OT - Which dual AMD motherboard to get?

[Clueless]

My son's computer croaked today so of course that gives me an excuse to upgrade to duallie and give my old one to him. Don't you love it when an old PC of yours dies? Anyway, I've been out of the hardware loop for a while so I don't know which MB to get. I'm looking for reliablity more than O/C or features. I'm thinking about either Asus or Tyan. Also is XP worth the hassle/reliability or should I just cough up the dough for MP? Any recommendations or comments are much appreciated!!

 

[Confused]

I personally don't see any point in going for the MPs when the much cheaper XPs can be made to run in MP mode by connecting one L5 bridge! (Even a pencil will work!)

As for the board, since getting my K7S5A as a stop-gap board earlier this year, i got out of track with the dual SoA boards. Best place to look would be 2CPU.com

Confused

 

[networkman]

Reporting from personal experience.. the XPs that first shipped didn't need any modification and could be run in SMP configurations - alas, the ones available nowadays have to be modded.

As for motherboards, if you're looking to do any overclocking, do NOT get a Tyan TigerMP as there is almost nothing in the way of options for that. It is a very stable board though, so if that's your inclination, it's great.. I've owned four of 'em.

I hear Asus makes a decent MP board with OC options.. can't remember which model, but I'm sure someone will pop in shortly; in the mean time, try looking in the Motherboard and CPU/Overclocking forums here at Anandtech.

 

[minendo]

Modding the XP chips to do smp is simple. Of course I didnt have to mod my two XP1800+s since they were already smp unlocked. I ordered retail XP1800+s from newegg about 2-3 months ago and they were both SMP unlocked.

 

[micron]

Last week I upgraded my dad's server to dual XP MP's using the MSI K7D Master. So far it has been 110% stable, no crashes at all running SETI and various other server apps 24/7. I didn't even do a fresh install of windows! :Q

 

[IsOs]

I have three types of dual cpu motherboards, Tiger MP (5), ASUS A7266D and MSI K7D Master. As you might have seen before, I had numerous problem with memory dying in the Tiger MPs. It doesn't give you any option to change FSB.

One of the ASUS AM7266D died on me after 1 week. It lock up one day and when rebooted, it only recognized 1 cpu. At first I thought I killed the cpu but later found out that it's the motherboard. I just returned it and nerver asked for the replacement. (it was an OEM version). The other ASUS AM7266D was a retail version and still working flawlessly at 139FSB. The ASUS board gives me more FSB flexibility than the MSI K7D Master.

The MSI K7D Master came with a built in game port should you need one. This board is stable at 137FSB with the dual 1800+ cooled only by a CoolerMaster copper heatsink on a non-airconditioned room that sometimes hit over 90F.

I had difficulty getting the game port of my Santa Cruz sound card on my ASUS motherboard.

Given the price difference between an ASUS and MSI board, I'll probably buy the MSI. Just be aware that MSI choose to use borderline capacitors (specs) that when you overclocked over a year tend to leak.

 

[Assimilator1]

Well if I were to go the dualie route the Asus A7M266D sounds like the 1 for me ......& now to dream for a bit

Btw does VIA have any plans to do a dual chipset?

 

[muttley]

I have the latest Tyan Tiger motherboard -4M
Be ware that certain products don't play well with the BIOS of the notherboard for example booting from a Promise 2000 wont work and the origional BIOS had to be updated

gigabyte had problems with the onboard raid that u couldn't boot from that either

Too many boards in my opinion and too many peripherials and only a small portion available to update like 256 even if you have a 4 meg size BIOS.

muttley

Some boards require registered memory and others only after 2 slots are filled then they all have to be registered memory.

 

[Evadman]

You can get mine You have to run a DC program in it though linky

 

[TNOguy]

I've been running an MSI dual board, K7D-Master, for a while now. The capacitor thing mentioned was news to me....

This dual board is okay, but a lot of times I have to reboot it multiple times to get both CPU's to work. That is very annoying....

I have it stepped up one notch in the FSB to where my XP-1800's are recognized as MP-1900's.

Other than that, it's been rock-solid stable even when I run 6 DC clients on the 2 CPU's for many months now....

But I have to say, with the boot anomalies, I'm thinking of looking into another dual board for my next duallie....real soon....

TNOguy

 

[Poof]

I have one of those Tyans from newegg running 2 XP 1600s. It's also got 256MB Mushkin registered, an Adaptec 2940UW (thanks to Cakin ) and a 4gig Quantum Atlas II refurbished SCSI drive. It's been up pretty consistently since I built it last spring, barring power fails longer than my UPS can hold, and running 2 SETI processes. I've been pretty pleased so far running Red Hat 7.3's server install (need new video card and more HD space though).

 

[Postman]

Tiger MP and Asus A7M266-D here. Both have been okay, except that the Asus just exhausted a Antec 350W PSU. I just came from the store with a trupower 550W one .

 

[Mardeth]

Originally posted by: Clueless
Don't you love it when an old PC of yours dies?

I know what you mean . My parents even pay the bill so Im always hoping for my hardware to fail. But it never has . Lol those who dont want it get it, those who do dont.

Anyway, Im not sure if Epox makes duallie boards but if they do I would buy from them. Very good quality!

 

[Mardeth]

Well they have one:

M762A - Industrial ATX Board for Dual Athlon MP Processor


Specification
Processor Dual PGA462 Socket A support AMD® Athlon? MP Processors
Core Logic AMD® 762? AGPsets
FSB 200/266MHz
Memory Four 184-pin DDR Register DIMM sockets, support up to 3.5GB
LAN Controller Intel 82559 controller support 10/100Base-TX Ethernet
VGA 4X AGP Pro Slot
Ethernet Controller Intel® 82559 Ethernet controller, for 10/100 Base-TX On-boar one RJ-45 LAN port
IDE Two channels for / Ultra DMA-33/66/100 up to 4 Devices
Dimensions (LxW) 9.6" x 12" (245mm x 305mm)

If your intrested: www.epox.org

 

[Clueless]

Hey, thanks for the suggestions. After some research I think the Tyan boards are out for me because they required registered DDR and I don't want to replace my 512 MB of unbuffered DDR yet. I'm not sure if I want the MSI either because the one that just die is an MSI board. So looks like the Asus A7M266-D is the one for me. Any problem with Promise FastTrak100 TX2 that you're aware of? Also all the reading about power supply requirement worries me a little bit. I have an Antec 400W PS. Is this enough to drive MB, 2 CPUs (1.4GHz), GeForce4 Ti 4200, FastTrak100 TX2, NIC, 4 40G HDs, DVD-ROM, and CD-R burner? Thanks again.