Upgraded system to dual CPU

[Sir Fredrick]

Yup, I finally put a second processor in my P2B-DS.
I now have 2 PIII450s. Overall it's hard to say if there's much of a performance increase for most tasks, but then I had a hard time telling the difference between this system and my mom's Athlon 750 for most tasks. I am able to multitask better though, I can listen to MP3s and they never skip no matter what I'm doing (I'm using an old ISA soundcard for the time being, so that used to be a problem), and of course my distributed client crunches twice as fast.

I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions on how to tweak a rig running Win2k, if there even are many tweaks for such a system. Also, I am wondering about SoftFSB and CPUID in Win2k.

When I was running Windows 95, if I changed the FSB with SoftFSB, it would register the new speed when I ran CPUID, but now if I run SoftFSB to change the FSB, CPUID still says I'm running at a 100MHz FSB, with the processors running at 450MHz.
benchmarking with the distributed client shows that there *is* a performance increase when I set the FSB higher (sine the P2B-DS has the 1/4 divider, I can go all the way up to 133), I just wonder why CPUID doesn't show it.

 

[tontod]

what OS are you currently running?

 

[Sir Fredrick]

Win2K

 

[Sir Fredrick]

^

 

[Radboy]

Thx for the post. I've looked into SMP. Never went for it. Most ppl say they notice a definite difference.

Heard of 2cpu.com? Guys that run it are helpful, & hava bbs w/ plenty of SMP-experienced users.

3D modeling apps like 3D Studio Max are supposed to put SMP to good use. Heard that Linux kernel 2.4 is out? .. after being delayed many months. 2.4 supposedly makes better use of SMP. I hear Photoshop likes SMP, too, but some of the plug-ins don't.

Did u install W2K after getting the 2nd CPU, or tweak W2K after it was installed w/ 1 CPU?

 

[Sir Fredrick]

I checked out 2cpu.com, didn't seem to have all that much info, unfortunately.

A lot of people have had problems with Win2k, if they add a second CPU after they've installed it, but I had my computer in ACPI mode prior to installation of the second CPU, and Windows 2000 automatically detected the new processor and switched over to the multiprocessor HAL without any user intervention.

 

[themuss]

i have a dual box runnning celeron466@560. atm i have 384MB in it too but thinking of putting more in. difficult to say whether it's the ram or the dual processors kicking in: lemme try and give you some examples.

entering or exiting a newsgroup in ou is now much quicker and doesn't make my comp stop for a few secs. i can now format a floppy disk and still use the box to surf.. woohoo

gamespy is much much quicker when switching between tabs, servers and games. (this is nice).

using smp seesaw pro (nice program, d/l it) i run and all my other processes on the first cpu and the games isolated on the second (nice, since most games aren't smp aware, and q3 will only go spm aware running as dedicated).

hmm... more... lemme see.... ofcourse there is also seti@home .... which is now crunching out twice the units of a single processor system).


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if you are unsure whether your box is running single processor mode or dual, right-click on comp, choose properties, hardware, device manager, computer .... check if it's called a multiprocessor pc... if it says singleprocessor, choose properties, update driver, choose multiprocessor pc, update driver, restart. that's it.