Sold on Dual CPUs?

[flagreen]

If I'm not mistaken, we have several members here who in the past year have gone the SMP route for various reasons. Clocker and Pradeep come to mind. I'm wondering if now looking back on your pre-dual days if you can tell us whether or not it was worth the money for you to go dual. Also, would you ever consider going back to a single cpu system?
What do you like best about your system now and how accurate was the advice you got before you went dual?

 

[James]

Dual is great when you need to encode DVDs into MPEG4. I can't think of a single other instance where it has been truly worthwhile.

When I bought my dual system about 9 months ago, I did a great big burst of DVD encoding my entire DVD collection (only about 30-40 DVDs) so I could stream them out around the house. Since then I don't think I've done anything that really benefitted from two CPUs.

At this stage I'm pretty sure that my next system will be a single CPU one. Duals will be the way to go in the future, but I think it's some way away - at least one hardware refresh cycle (about 2 years for me).

 

[CougTek]

Well James, you could always run a F@h client on the CPU you don't currently use :mrgrn:

 

[Jake the Dog]

been there and done that and concluded the same as james is now coming too now. good and fun for a while but for home use, they are not the "ducks guts".

i had a dual p/pro 233 NT4 (overclocked!) system with 192mb 60ns EDO ram in 1996 with scsi and all the cool stuff. it was soooo fast, i could edit 100mb photoshop files in less a few than minutes. (i was doing poster art at the time but after i stopped that all i had was an expensive toy good for bragging rights but not really much else.

they are fun to use at first and a good exercise to build but unless you have a real and often need for multi-processing, they don't really provide much benefit in terms of their expense.

all imho of course.

 

[CougTek]

they are fun to use at first and a good exercise to build but unless you have a real and often need for multi-processing, they don't really provide much benefit in terms of their expense.

Considering that nowadays, you can build a dual Athln MP setup for less than a single high-end Pentium 4 on RDRAM platform, I don't consider the expense to be that great. But I agree that most users don't need it badly.

You forgot to mention distributed computing to the list of applications that benefit a lot from SMP.

 

[P5-133XL]

I have been sold on dual CPU machines for a long time. They just are not that much more cost than a single (as long as you aren't buying retail): Most sellers of complete machines sell duals with Server markups. One simply has to buy/build smart. A dual MP/MPX motherboard with a couple of CPU's clocked a few Mhz steps down from the maximum availiable is a great performance buy.

I too don't believe that they supply alot of bang for the average user. However, they are signifigently "snappier" and don't bog down doing heavy work. They also increase the useable lifespan of a machine not only because of the dual CPU's but also because the MB's tend to allow more ram than a single. Thus when the singles are starting to get long in the tooth that extra CPU will be giving an extra boost and adding extra ram can make all the difference.

I also find that dual MB's tend to be more reliable and stable than single's. Because duals tend to go into server's it is demanded that they be reliable while single motherboards are often cheaply made. The CPU's also add redundency because if a CPU/fan/VRM go out then often one can simply disable the effected CPU and run the machine as a single untill a repair can actually be made.

All in all, I think they are good as long as one is using an OS that can use them like XP, W2k, NT, OS/2.

 

[flagreen]

I've been using duals for about two years now and I doubt I'll go back to single cpu system. They are snappier and with scsi and adequate memory there is virtually no lag in the system at all. I still do a fair amount of DVD ripping (for backup only of course) and other video encoding which I can do as I surf the web or work with office apps. My current system is by far the most stable I've ever had. I have seen a lot of folks complaining about Windows XP. But I've had no problems with XP Pro at all.

 

[Clocker]

I agree with P5_133. Duals are just not that much more $ for what you get. If you think about it, the expense for an SMP system is relatively small:

• 
  Price Premium for Tiger MPX = ~$100
  2nd CPU (Athlon XP 1700+ in my case) = $80
  Price Premium for Registered DDR = ~$20 (??)

So, for an extra $200, you get twice the CPU power (for Folding or whatever), a system that can handle gobs of ram, 64-bit PCI, a significantly snappier system, a higher quality product, integrated LAN and enterprise class reliability. Sounds like a great deal to me.

As far as day-to-day home use is concerned, I agree that a SMP system is not going to change your life. I'm not a heavy heavy user (at least IMO) and I'd compare my move to SMP as being slightly less noticeable than my move to SCSI during light use. During heavy system use is when the SCSI and SMP attributes of my system really shine. The system always has snap and never seems to get bogged down. Also, the stability of this system exceeds that of any system I have used except my $35K UNIX based J6000 workstation at work. I have never seen a blue screen since I got this system up and running with the correct AMD chipset drivers. I've run for several weeks at a time, continuously folding proteins, without even the slightest hiccup.

Am I sold on duals.....YES!

 

[Pradeep]

I love my dual XP 1.47. Very snappy with SCSI. Excellent for divX encoding. And great for distributed computing of course My next computer will be a dual too.

 

[Pradeep]

Tyan Tiger MP
Dual XP 1.47
512MB REG ECC PC2100
Tekram 390-U3D
1*X15 (18GB), 2*X15-36LP (18GB SCA hot swap)
2*WD AB 120GB
1*WD BB 80GB
1*Deathstar 75GXP (45GB)
Radeon AIW 7500, Pioneer 10X DVD, Sony 24x CD-RW

 

[Adcadet]

I'm a DualieHead.

let's see...my modern computing history is as follows:
P2-266/96MB EDO - Sept. 1997
P4-450/128MB PC100 - December 1998
Dual Celeron 400/256MB PC133 - Sept. 1999
Dual P3-700/256MB PC100 - Sept. 2000
Dual Athlon MP 1200/512 MB PC2100 - Sept. 2001

I remember the dual Celeron 400 system being much snappier than my single P2-450 (although the Celeron had mom RAM). I also ran my dual P3-700 while my roommate ran a single P3-800 (same board, the Tyan Tiger 100) and remember how much peppier my system was than his (although I was running a Cheetah 18XL and he was running a 75GXP). And today I really only have my Celeron 366 laptop to compare my dual MP system to (don't worry, the dual MP is much much faster). Now, is dual realliy peppier? To me there are no benchmarks reported that accurately reflect the increased "snap" that dual machines give. I'd love to see some that try to reflect real usage patterns similar to what iPeak can do for HDs. I'm not totally convinced that, say a 2.53GHz P4A isn't faster and peppier than a dual 1200 MHz Palomino, but I'd rather work on the dual Palomino machine personally.

Note that I am not much of a "power" user. I rarely compile code, I don't run databases (except for the occasional very small Access DB), and I don't do CAD. I also am a light gamer (CivIII, Madden, Command & Conquer is about it). But I have been running dual monitors since my dual Celeron 400 days, and I do tend to be very demanding of my systems. While I notice my fiance tends to launch an app and patiently wait for it to load, I'll go ahead and launch an app or two at the same time and then try to do something else while they load. I've ran Win2K on all of the systems except the Dual AMD, which runs WinXP. I've also ran Red Hat Linux and Mandrake on all of the systems, with the occasional other Linux distro.

So, the question is : is it worth it? Well, I'm a (relatively) poor graduate student and I keep going dual. (granted, I do love computers and they are my single biggest non-essential expense). My fiance (she runs most of the same apps as I do, so she's not much of a power user either) is still running her P2-400, and I expect to build her either a fast single CPU system or a cheap dual system. If I were building today it'd prolly be either an AthlonXP >1700+, or a cheap dual AMD system, maybe dual Durons if I can find a pair that work, or a pair of XP or Thunderbirds that are cheap and available. Is a dual system overkill my fiance? Probably, but then again her PC is a major center of her life (I'm the other). When we have the money, we'll both probably drive decent cards with air conditioning, power windows, and a few other nice features. These aren't things we need, but value enough to spend more money on. I also don't need all the eye candy in WinXP, but I think some of it is nice and I pay for the performance hit for it (and thus pay for better CPUs to run those).

I'd highly suggest sitting in front of a dualie to see what it feels like.

 

[Buck]

Interesting observations and experiences from everyone.

My dual processing days started with a dual Celeron system created as a small office server for a customer. After that, I spent a great deal of money, and built myself a dual PIII 667EB Slot-1 system. I’ve also put together a dual PIII 933EB Socket-370 for myself, and recently used a dual Athlon MP 1600+ as my personal workstation.

I recently sold the dual Athlon MP system and switched over to a single Athlon 1400C system. When I made this transition, only a few major components changed. My disk sub-system stayed the same (ATA), my video card went from a GeForce2 MX400 with 64 MB of memory to a GeForce2 MX400 with 32 MB of memory. Additionally, the CPUs changed, and the chipset changed. The amount of RAM changed, I went from 512 MB to 256 MB, and it went from Registered ECC to regular. The Operating System continued as XP Professional, along with a host of other software.

My gaming experience has not changed; Age of Empires seems to actually play better now. Using QuarkXpress for page-layout, and Adobe Photoshop for graphics work seem to work at the same speed too. Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and some other software all seem to work just as fast. Usually when I’m doing web-design, I have Opera, Mozilla, Netscape, and IE open along with EditPlus, Photoshop, and sometimes illustrator. While I do my work, I’m usually in the habit of playing music through Windows Media Player, and I haven’t changed any of the default settings in Windows XP regarding the GUI, memory usage, etc. One dramatic change I’ve noticed is that my system POSTs much quicker, and Windows XP loads faster (my domain login has not changed). One other item changed, I went from using a Turtle Beach sound card to the onboard AC’97 audio.

Some may argue that I didn’t have drivers installed on the dual system, but I did. Tyan has all of the necessary drivers needed for download. The only reason that I can figure for my lack-luster performance for the dual Athlon system was that all of the work I did was never really taking advantage of my dual CPUs. The only time they came in handy was when I ran two instances of Genome. You would think that with all of the changes I made transitioning to the Athlon 1400C system, that I’d see degradation in performance, but I haven’t.

For me, building the single Athlon system was relatively inexpensive compared to the dual system, so I’m happy to get my money back. The person who purchased the dual Athlon system works with SQL quite often, and hence should take better advantage of the hardware. If my computing habits stay the same, I doubt that I will ever switch back to dual CPUs for my workstation.

 

[Adcadet]

Some may argue that I didn’t have drivers installed on the dual system, but I did. Tyan has all of the necessary drivers needed for download.

Which drivers are you referring to? Did I miss something?

Interesting observations...any comment specifically to the "snappiness/peppiness" others (including myself) mentioned? Are we all deluding ourselves (or just using our machines more intensely)?

Thanks all!

 

[Jake the Dog]

i hadn't really thought about cost increase ratio of a single compared to dual system nowadays. back when i built mine in dec 1996, each 180mhz 256k p/pro cost me something like AU$950 and that was a very good price. the supermicro dual atx mobo was somewhere in the vacinity of AU$600. add to that i had to addtional purchase expensive 60ns EDO ram to make use of teh 2ns processor and the difference between a capable single and dual system was quite considerable. looking at it now and reading your comments i see the ratio is not that much anymore

 

[Cliptin]

looking at it now and reading your comments i see the ratio is not that much anymore

It still costs about double!

 

[Jake the Dog]

hmm not so sure about that. nowadays, many single cpu systems seem to have as much ram as a dually's and dual borard seem only to be about double the price, not triple.

(maybe i want another dually but don't want to fund it so i'm in denial... )

 

[Buck]

Which drivers are you referring to? Did I miss something?

Interesting observations...any comment specifically to the "snappiness/peppiness" others (including myself) mentioned? Are we all deluding ourselves (or just using our machines more intensely)?

Thanks all!

The Tyan S2460 that I had has AGP and EIDE drivers which helped out a lot in regards to the systems stability. Also, Tyan lists their System Monitor as a driver download.

 

[James]

I must say I haven't noticed the much vaunted dual CPU "snap." I didn't really notice a huge difference in day to day use going from an Athlon 1GHz to dual 1700+s, actually. Obviously frame rates in games are better and DiVX encoding - wow! - but it wasn't a difference that was worth the extra ~USD400 or so for the second processor and the incremental cost of the dual mobo, IMO.

I do wish there was a single CPU board with 64bit PCI slots.

 

[cas]

The challenge isn’t so much building a board with 64bit slots, it’s building one with 64bit slots and an AGP slot.

The upcoming Tyan Trinity GC-SL is a single cpu board with two PCI-X slots. Of course, the Grand Champion SL doesn’t support AGP.

You could build a low cost board with 64/66 PCI out of any modern VIA chipset, but you would have to replace the AGP slot with the VPX-64

Even Clawhammer will be little help. Although HyperTransport can be daisy chained, both the AMD-8151 AGP tunnel, and the AMD-8131 PCI-X tunnel have 6.4GB/s side-a interfaces, and 1.6GB/s side-b interfaces. This makes a:
Claw --> AGP --> PCI-X --> I/O Hub
board very inefficient.

What would be interesting would be a single CPU Sledgehammer board. It may be possible to interface I/O tunnels to each of the three 6.4GB/s Hypertransport interfaces. If so, you could build a system with an 8x AGP Port, and eight 100MHz PCI-X slots, on four channels.

Outstanding for applications that are bandwidth, not CPU limited.

Of course, you will pay for such a configuration.

 

[LiamC]

Thinking of taking the plunge.

Does anyone know of any problems with the Tiger MP? I have seen a good price on one and might make the jump if there aren't any quirks.

Do the CPU's have to be the same stepping?
Does the USB work on the Tiger MP (AMD760MP - not MPX)?
Can 64-bit/33Mhz PCI slots accept 32-bit/33MHz peripherals?
What are good CPU fans?

Have I missed anything? Thanks for your help.

 

[cas]

Actually, the GC-SL is designed for SMP, but outfitted with a single cpu in on the TYAN board. This doesn't really count. (Same could be done with i860, AMD762, etc...)

I guess that just leaves VIA. Does anybody know if any of VIA's customers have bothered to build a VPX-64 board?

 

[James]

Thinking of taking the plunge.

Does anyone know of any problems with the Tiger MP? I have seen a good price on one and might make the jump if there aren't any quirks.

Do the CPU's have to be the same stepping?
Does the USB work on the Tiger MP (AMD760MP - not MPX)?
Can 64-bit/33Mhz PCI slots accept 32-bit/33MHz peripherals?
What are good CPU fans?

Have I missed anything? Thanks for your help.

Liam, perhaps you can buy mine. (What's a "good price"?)

1. No
2. Yes, but it's USB1, not 2.
3. Yes
4. 80mm ones using an adapter, on top of a Bitspower 60N or whatever it is. Check out Dan's[/url for a review of the Bitspower stuff. Anyway, it's quiet and cool.

 

[James]

Dan's

 

[LiamC]

James, AUS$395. You're in Brissy aren't you? If you want to sell, email me with your price.

Will the Bitspower 80D's fit? Or is the space around the sockets tight? I have been using the ThermalTake Volcano 6CU and Alpha PAL6035's and am happy with both of those - Alpha's should fit but the Volcano's aren't square and overhang a bit - would that be a prob?

Thanks James

 

[Cliptin]

hmm not so sure about that. nowadays, many single cpu systems seem to have as much ram as a dually's and dual borard seem only to be about double the price, not triple.

(maybe i want another dually but don't want to fund it so i'm in denial... )

Don't forget the cost of the additional CPU and the price premium for the special RAM (maybe).

 

[James]

James, AUS$395. You're in Brissy aren't you? If you want to sell, email me with your price.

I'm pretty sure I'm in Sydney. At least, that's what I put in the "location" thingy over here.
<---

Is that $395 just for the board? Do you want the CPUs (1700+XPs) and RAM too? (2x256MB of Nanya registered CAS2.)

Will the Bitspower 80D's fit? Or is the space around the sockets tight? I have been using the ThermalTake Volcano 6CU and Alpha PAL6035's and am happy with both of those - Alpha's should fit but the Volcano's aren't square and overhang a bit - would that be a prob?

I don't think the Alphas will fit, aren't they the ones you secure through the mounting holes on the board? The Tiger MP doesn't have those.

The Bitspower 80Ds fit, I'm running those now, with old Thermoengine fans.

Even the Tiger fans and heatsinks fit, but it's (very) tight.

The Volcanos should fit, I think that's what Pradeeps running...?

 

[Pradeep]

Liam, I'm using two Volcano 6Cu+ (the 7000rpm version of the 6Cu) and they fit just fine in my TigerMP. The Alphas won't.

 

[flagreen]

7000? Yikes, a bit on the loud side aren't they?

 

[Pradeep]

What was that? Didn't catch u.......

 

[LiamC]

James, OK, me fool . Shoot me a price on all the bits you want to get rid of. $395 is for the board only (SecretNet or whoever they are).

I'll probably need CPU's, not sure about the memory, was going to re-use my Micron unbuffered (2 x 256).

Pradeep, 2 x Vol +'s! You're a maniac - and deaf.

 

[Pradeep]

So the ringing in the ears isn't normal?

I wouldn't recommend unbuffered memory in the TigerMP tho I guess you could see if it worked out OK before ordering registered modules.

 

[Mercutio]

I used to build dual machines for my workstations. I went from a dual 486/33 (now THAT'S history) to a dual P5/133 to a dual PPro/200 (horribly, horribly expensive, that one) and finally to a dual P3/600. At that point, the returns diminished to nil, IMO. BP6s made cheap celeron dualies a possibility, but ultimately, the single-chip systems just outraced the affordability of dual setups. If I had tons of money to burn I might look at an SMP rig again, but to be honest, every time I look up, single CPUs are 300MHz faster, and I've found that's good enough for most of what I do now, just like IDE disks are basically good enough for what I do.

 

[Clocker]

I agree pradeep. My MPX board is supposed to accept unbuffered DDR in the first two slots but I could not get it to boot unless I had only one stick of Crucial unbuffered DDR installed. Even at that, I would get blue-screens all the time. After getting the Kingston registered memory, this thing is like a rock.

I have two very nice and quiet coolers on my two 1700+ cpus. The OCZ Goliath SE has a big temperature controlled 80mm fan on it that sucks rather than blows. It really works! I can hear the difference when the house is warm or cold but the coolers are always fairly quiet. I got a a very good deal on them from newegg ($25 each I believe)....

 

[Clocker]

BTW: While folding my cold CPU (by the memory) sits at about 42C while the hotter CPU (right above the AGP card) hovers around 53C...

C

 

[Buck]

BTW: While folding my cold CPU (by the memory) sits at about 42C while the hotter CPU (right above the AGP card) hovers around 53C...

C

Wow, I never had that much discrepancy Clocker. Usually it was about 1 or 2 degrees Celsius for my Tyan S2460.

 

[Clocker]

Searching around on the net (actually google news search) I have found about 10C is a fairly common difference...at least for the MPX. If these were slot CPUs I would not hesitate to switch them just to see the difference but it is a PITA to swap these socketed CPUs...

C

 

[Cliptin]

Dual is great when you need to encode DVDs into MPEG4. I can't think of a single other instance where it has been truly worthwhile.

When I bought my dual system about 9 months ago, I did a great big burst of DVD encoding my entire DVD collection (only about 30-40 DVDs) so I could stream them out around the house. Since then I don't think I've done anything that really benefitted from two CPUs.

At this stage I'm pretty sure that my next system will be a single CPU one. Duals will be the way to go in the future, but I think it's some way away - at least one hardware refresh cycle (about 2 years for me).

James, I'm glad you brought the topic back up.

How do you stream DVDs around the house? When you ripped your DVDs did they maintain their multichannel audio? I've heard that can be a problem.

 

[Mercutio]

I'm not James but...
It's possible to multiplex AC3 back into .AVI files. You need to use a program called graphedit to do it, and playback sync is a cold-hearted b*tch. That, plus the filesizes for .AC3 audio are sort-of high, so if you want to maintain video quality, you're looking at 2 - 3 CDs worth (say, 400MB of AC3 v. 120MB of mp3) instead of 1 - 2 for plain ol' MP3 audio.

Better to just rip and convert to MP3. You can always do ProLogic II on the back-end if you really need to hear something out of your center channel.

 

[James]

How do you stream DVDs around the house? When you ripped your DVDs did they maintain their multichannel audio? I've heard that can be a problem.

I use an 802.11b network and just open server-based movie files with Windows Media Player from the remote client. The sound is just stereo because (a) the clients are for the most part not tremendously powerful CPU-wise. The movies are destined to be watched on a fairly small screen, not connected to a full surround sound system plus big screen TV (I use the original DVDs and my main home theatre setup for that). (b) 802.11b has limited bandwidth available and AC3 audio is fairly large and (c) all the problems Mercutio mentioned.

 

[flagreen]

Any of you Guys tried Divx 5 yet? I have found it to be superior to anything else out there. And I mean anything.

Anyone know how to encode with Tmpgenc using Divx?