Dual CPU motherboard review
Over the last couple of months I have been building a few machines
with dual CPU capability. Motherboards I have used in these machines are:
Abit BP6
A brief review of the features of these boards
|
Name |
PCI |
ISA |
Dimm |
Overclock |
UK Price (approx) |
|
Abit |
5 |
2 |
3 |
Y** |
£89 |
|
Supermicro |
5 |
2 |
4 |
Y* |
£185 |
|
Epox |
5 |
2 |
4 |
Y* |
£112 |
|
Gigabyte |
5 |
2 |
4 |
N |
£99 |
*Both the Supermicro & Epox can be overclocked by about 12%
** Like most Abit boards, both the voltage & FSB have many settings.
All four boards are large ATX style units, no problems were encountered using standard desktop cases (Chenbro). Although the Gigabyte board being a little bigger than the others prevented the bottom 51/4" bay being used.
All the boards worked fine using standard PC100 memory & mix of AGP S3 & PCI Matrox video cards.
No problems were encountered using Windows 2000 (eval build 2195) or NT4, hey some even ran Linux!
Stability
I have no real measure of this, so going by the number of strange crashes & other unidentifiable problems.
|
Unit |
Stability rating* |
Num crashes in 2months |
|
Abit |
8 |
0 |
|
Supermicro |
9 |
0 |
|
Epox |
7 |
1 |
|
Gigabyte |
5 |
5 |
* out of 10, 10=max, 0=dead.
** not including any setup & installation problems.
All four units are run constantly (24hrs/7days/week).
The gigabyte seems particularly bad, which I put down to having to use a beta bios, (as the official bios has problems with 50% occupancy on one CPU – something to do with USB ports). This was unexpected, as this board is the only unit in the group that isn’t overclocked!
All boards were fitted with a pair of CPUs with the same SL codes.
Overclocking
|
Unit |
CPU Type |
Rated Speed |
Actual Speed |
|
Abit |
Celeron 370 |
433 |
541 |
|
Supermicro |
P3-500 (512k) |
500 |
560 |
|
Epox |
P2-450 (512k) |
450 |
504 |
|
Gigabyte |
P2-450 (512k) |
450 |
450 |
For overclocking the Abit board comes out top, the Supermicro & Epox boards
would only allow a max FSB speed of 112MHz (not obvious from the BIOS – it’s
via an option called ‘manufacturer mode’). The Gigabyte board can’t be overclocked
(very poor indeed).
Performance.
Using a pair of SETI (CLI 2.04) clients as a comparative real-world benchmark,
|
Unit |
Time to process a pair of work units (one/CPU) |
|
Abit |
13 hrs 45mins |
|
Supermicro |
7hrs 45mins |
|
Epox |
9hrs 30mins |
|
Gigabyte |
10hrs 00mins |
The Abit boards fails badly here, which I guess is due to the lower FSB speed of 83Mhz & the smaller 128K CPU cache.
Overall.
Overall I’d rate the Epox or the Supermicro board, as the Epox is considerably cheaper than the Supermicro – The Epox wins.
(There is a cheaper Supermicro P6DBE, but it’s only about £20 cheaper than its GX brother.) The Abit unit doesn’t seem to do that well on the performance tests, I was expecting about 8 hrs/pair of packets on the SETI test. I am not wholly convinced that the poor performance is down to a slightly slower FSB & a smaller cache.
Specs.
Here are the specs for the machines (there is a lot of junk parts in here, so don’t laugh too much!).
Abit BP6.
128Meg PC100 SDRAM, pair of 540M Maxtor IDE hard drives, S3 AGP card & a 3C509B NIC.
128Meg PC100 SDRAM, 13G EIDE Fujitsu hard drive, S3 AGP card & a 3C509B NIC.
Epox.
128Meg PC100 SDRAM, Asus SC200 SCSI controller, 2GB Seagate Ultra drive, Matrox Millennium (PCI) video & a 3C509B NIC.
192M PC100 SDRAM, Advansys 3940 Ultra SCSI with Plex 12/20 CDROM, pair of 5G Quantum EIDE drives, crappy Mustek SCSI card, dodgy ISA NE2000 compat. NIC, Voodoo 2, Matrox Mystique 220 (PCI) video & an AVM ISDN adapter.
Many of the new quality components listed above were purchased from Ulysses Computing.
