Creeping Stone said:
=|[ P2B's ]|= said:
Creeping Stone wrote:
How about finding a bargain dual P4 mobo and running two hyperthreading big
cache P4s on it next year when theyre affordable.
Dual P4 motherboards don't exist because P4 doesn't support SMP. Do you
mean dual Xeon?
P4s are unknown to me, isnt there a way to botch some standard P4's to run
Dual like Athlon XP/MP? I like the idea of having Dual Hyperthreading
P4/Xeons with 4 times the usual interupt capability, that could benefit
smooth multitasking, avoid hangs when things crash /drivers stall.. I
imagine thats how it works.
Doesnt the P4 Extreme edition support SMP?
~might get to play with Pentiums next year.
The P4 extreme is just a rebadge of an existing P4 chip. It does not
support SMP. If you need SMP support your only choice in that line is
the Xeon, and the best bus speed you can get with the current crop is
533FSB.
As far as user experience goes, if you switch between a ton of apps
all the time, have many open at once, and are willing to spend the
money on some high end fast SCSI hard drives -- the dual Xeon system
will "appear" to you to be more responsive and faster for day in day
out things from the usability perspective. (Though a single P4 system
will do individual task faster. In some cases a dual is slower for
task, just in real world use you notice it's a little bit nicer
experience.) As far as upgrade paths, you can get a decent P4 board
with the 800FSB and throw a moderate P4 in it now and wait for them to
come down in price later. That's probably the best upgrade path on a
single. On a dual Xeon, those chips will almost never become cheap and
even if they did, the big improvement in those would be a 800FSB and
then you would be looking at a new dual processor MB to support
it...Not going to be cheap.)
Couldn't tell you about the AMD upgrade path. All I know is they are
changing the socket for the 64 from 940 to 939, and the 939 is
supposed to be hot. Big bucks either way.