Duron OCing / SMPing

[NotALlama]

I was wondering if it were possible to mod a Duron Applebred, based on the Thoroughbred CPu core, to work in multiprocessing? After this I'd overclock the hell out of it and have the ultimate price / performance subversion.

 

[TerryMathews]

Don't bother.

At this point, I can't in good conscience recommend buying a 760MPX setup. Memory bandwidth is pathetic compared to modern systems. AMD has made unlocking (worthwhile) processors difficult to impossible. And the 760MPX has no effective bus overclocking (save for one rare board).

If you must follow this route, get a Barton-based core. The extra cache will help counter-balance the slow memory bus. To overclock, in the simplest terms, you're going to need to alter the bridges on the chip to set a new multiplier; something that I do not believe you can do on the newest Bartons.

The one board that supported any worthwhile bus overclocking was the one made by Iwill. It would (reportedly) overclock to FSBs higher than 166MHz. But you would need cards that supported running that far out of spec, as the MPX doesn't have either a fixed bus speed or ratios for 166MHz.

A high-end MPX system (Dual Bartons running > 2GHz) would beat an overclocked 2.4C to 3.0GHz system by a small to medium-sized margin in CPU-intensive benchmarks, but would lose to the overclocked P4 system in memory-bandwidth benchmarks something on the order of 2:1 assuming the best case for the P4 (Dual channel 200MHz RAM)

 

[aka1nas]

The best you will probably find now are the MSI k7ds, which can overclock up to 150Mhz FSB. It only does multi's upto 12.5x, so you would have to mod multipliers. If you go that route, I would reccomend maybe getting a mobile Barton, as it already runs at 266Mhz FSB. This will give you a slighlty higher multiplier to play with without doing any modding on the chip. The Mobile mod for bypassing the new Barton lock will not work on the 760MPX chipset. IOW, the overclocking potential of the chipset isn't all that great. I built mine a few months ago and it was an ok deal for me because I already had a pair of 1700+ tbred Bs so it was cheaper to buy the board and use my old parts than get new pc3200 RAM a board and a barton. Plus I always wanted a dualie rig.

 

[Mingon]

Well my dual xp2500+ run pretty good at 2*2.35ghz without pushing it, so dont believe everything you read. Combined with a 29160 + 15k scsi setup I have a machine that is very snappy. I can encode divx files in dr divx at full quality at 40-45 fps, whilst that might not sound overly impressive I can get that for each CPU i.e 2 versions running for a combined 80-90fps. Not many P4's can manage that (my 2.4c@3.0ghz gets nowhere close).

 

[Fraggster]

Yes you can and they work quite well for the price, i knew two ppl over at hard forums that did it, (un)fortuantely i have left that shithole for good so you will have to ask over there yourself