Tyan's Tiger MP - ?'s about Processors used

[Letitfly]

An article I read with anandtech linked here says something about running dual Durons and dual T-birds on Tyan's Tiger MP. My understanding was that you could only run Athlon MP processors in a dual AMD processor environment. Can anyone comment on this so I don't buy 2 Duron 1.1 Ghz processors or so I don't by 2 T-Bird 1.4 266 processors and eat the tab.

Also, can any comment on Win2k or XP Pro for SMP and gaming? Will a traditional good first person shooter take advantage of SMP when you are playing? Will it run the game on one CPU and the Internet/TCPIP on the other? Will Windows natively decide to do something like that? I don't want to make the investment in a dual Athlon board if I won't see significant performance increase with my gaming.

 

[Jerboy]

<< An article I read with anandtech linked here says something about running dual Durons and dual T-birds on Tyan's Tiger MP. My understanding was that you could only run Athlon MP processors in a dual AMD processor environment. Can anyone comment on this so I don't buy 2 Duron 1.1 Ghz processors or so I don't by 2 T-Bird 1.4 266 processors and eat the tab.

Also, can any comment on Win2k or XP Pro for SMP and gaming? Will a traditional good first person shooter take advantage of SMP when you are playing? Will it run the game on one CPU and the Internet/TCPIP on the other? Will Windows natively decide to do something like that? I don't want to make the investment in a dual Athlon board if I won't see significant performance increase with my gaming. >>




Athlon MP's are GUARANTEED to run in SMP mode, but XP is pretty much the same and it should work fine.

I'd go for dual XP1600 or XP1800

 

[Letitfly]

So everyone can confirm the fact that you can run any AMD processor in a dual processor configuration?

What about gaming? Will it help?

 

[Jerboy]

<< So everyone can confirm the fact that you can run any AMD processor in a dual processor configuration?

What about gaming? Will it help? >>




I don't think you can run Thunderbirds or Durons in duallies... but I'm not sure..

 

[AGodspeed]

So everyone can confirm the fact that you can run any AMD processor in a dual processor configuration?

What about gaming? Will it help?

Currently, the only Athlon MP motherboard is the Tyan Tiger/Thunder MP motherboards. As Anand stated in his review of these Tyan boards:

During our weeks of testing we never encountered a single problem with the Tiger MP, even after testing it outside of AMD's and Tyan's specifications by using Dual Athlon (Thunderbird) CPUs and Dual Duron (Morgan) CPUs.

Yes, you can use two Durons, Thunderbirds, XP's, and of course MP's. The only difference is that the Athlon MP's are tested, the Duron/T-bird/XP's are not fully tested (supposedly). I'd go with the safe bet and get two Athlon MP's (even though they're more expensive). If you want a dual Athlon system, you're likely gonna want everything to be rock solid, so I'd stick with the Athlon MP's.

As for gaming, I've read that gaming sometimes gets worse as a result of having a dual processor configuration (this goes for dual Athlon MP's and Dual Pentium 4 Xeons). I'd research that some before making a decision if you care about gaming (btw, are you going to be building a dual system, if so I'd think about going with a non-dual setup unless there are some reasons you want a dual setup that you haven't mentioned in this theard so far).