dual processors...

[Whitehawk]

hi all...

i am thinking of upgrading one of my computers to dual P4 2.8GH 'C' models. I was wondering what a good mid range motherboard that supports dual processors would be???

i would also like one with good ram capacity and plenty of space for new bits and pieces (and that works with existing hardware)

at the moment 512 mb DDR noname ram

FX5600


can anyone please give me some pointers???

thanks

Alex

[Whitehawk]

oh and a 40 gb Seagate (i think) HDD

[[Neo770]]

The standard P4 cannot be run in dual, you have to use Xeons.

[Whitehawk]

ok

[PresterJohn]

the minimum you can expect to pay for a good dual xeon board is ~$200 though i've seen the older intel models sometimes for as low as $150 on the search engines.

i prefer the tyan boards myself but gigabyte, asus & msi also make good dual xeon boards. supermicro also makes good boards but are probably out of your price range.

the most important questions you need to ask yourself is what apps are you running which will take advantage of the dual cpus and how much memory you plan to add? the latter is esp. important because different mobos accept different max memory sizes. the apps are important because not every app scales faster on multiple cpus and running certain apps will cause you to realize bottlenecks in other places. for example, the xeons suffer from relatively low memory bandwidth...the amd opterons are much better suited if you run very memory/cpu intensive software such as virtualization software, web servers, etc.

[Whitehawk]

remember im in australia so my prices are doubled

[Whitehawk]

world builder and a few other graphics and design ones