YADCT: Thinking of going from an Opty 144 to an X2 3800+

[kyparrish]

Yet Another Dual-Core Thread:

I'm currently running an Opteron 144 @ 2.6ghz on a DFI Ultra-D nf4 board. I'm sick of not being able to do anything else while I'm encoding, so I want to go to dual-core. I've got a few questions though...

1. Will my Antec Truepower 2.0 430w PSU be able to handle the extra juice required by the dual-core? (I'm also running a 6800GS).

2. Will my 2x512mb Corsair VS Ram be enough to encode on one core, and surf/listen to music with the other core?

3. My mobo has the BIOS from June 2005, the only one released since then just supports the FX-60, so I probably won't even update the BIOS. Should it just be "plug and play" to install the new chip, and the AMD driver for X2? Or, am I looking at some serious headaches?

4. Will I have a lot of interaction as far as telling the computer what to do (i.e. do this on one core, and do this on the 2nd core?) Or, is it pretty seamless?

Thanks so much for the help, I've done as much research as possible, but if someone can help me answer these specific questions, I might pull the trigger on an X2.

 

[stevty2889]

1. Should be plenty, I am using a 450w Smartpower with my OC'd 4200+ and 7800GT

2. Should be, encoding is more cpu intensive than it is ram intensive for the most part

3. No need to update the bios then. You may have to do a repair install of windows if it doesn't automaticly update to the ACPI multi-proccessor HAL(ie it will show 2 CPU's in device manager, and will say ACPI multi-proccessor PC under computer in device manager).

4. It's seemless, however you can also specify which core to run on as well if you want to.

 

[kyparrish]

thanks so much for the reply stevty2889.

 

[kyparrish]

One more question, how does a slower hard drive affect the dual-core experience? I'm using a Seagate ata/100 hard drive, 7200rpm, 8mb buffer, and I'm wondering if it will be a bottleneck when encoding on one core, and surfing/listening to music/watching movies, on the other core.

 

[Markfw]

You don't need to do a repair install to get two cores. Just go to device manager, and scan for hardware changes. If it doesn;t find it, just open the computer, and select multiprocessor PC.

 

[stevty2889]

Originally posted by: kyparrish
One more question, how does a slower hard drive affect the dual-core experience? I'm using a Seagate ata/100 hard drive, 7200rpm, 8mb buffer, and I'm wondering if it will be a bottleneck when encoding on one core, and surfing/listening to music/watching movies, on the other core.

Thats not really as slower hardrive, if you had like a 5400rpm 2mb cache drive I'd be worried.