Quad PIII question

[hezaplaya]

I am looking into a quad PIII system, and the only quad pIII motherboards I can find are for "pentium III Xeon" processors. I know the Xeon is just a pIII with a large amount of cache, but will a standard pIII work in it? Also does anyone know where I can get a decent quad PIII motherboard for a decent price. Links plz. Thanx.

 

[Pariah]

PIII Xeons are slot 2 CPU's while non-Xeons are socket. Quad and cheap don't go in the same sentence. Since the PIII Xeons top out at 900MHz, it would probably be faster to get a dual 2.4GHz P4 Xeon. It will certainly be cheaper.

 

[Sunner]

Out of curiosity, what do you want with a quad system?

Most people who actually has a use for one buy Compaq's, IBM's, Dell's, etc etc.

 

[dexvx]

A p3 coppermine in quad mode (if that is possible) will suck. 256KB of cache per CPU in quad mode? Thats going to make your system freaking slow (especially with single channel SDRam). Most all quad cpu systems and above have at least 512KB cache, usually configured to 1MB or 2MB.

 

[AndyHui]

Coppermine Pentium III XEONs are only available for dual processing.

You have to use large cache Cascades Pentium III XEONs to go quad processing. VERY expensive.

 

[Pariah]

"A p3 coppermine in quad mode (if that is possible) will suck. 256KB of cache per CPU in quad mode?"

The current socket PIII that is used for servers is the Tualatin which has 512KB cache and tops out at 1.4GHz. A quad using those would be pretty nice, but I don't think quad socketed PIII boards exist. The only quad boards I've seen are the PIII Xeon slot 2 boards. The PIII Xeon tops out at only 900MHz but is available with up to 2MB L2 cache.

 

[vash]

Andy is right.

Quads, from Intel, are only going to be available in the form of the server chips -- XEON. P3 duallie is the best you can get for P3, but if you want more CPUs, you must go XEON.

vash

 

[Beeker25]

If you want Quad CPU's, check out the new Tyan Thunder GC-HE S4520 Quad Xeon board with 4 x 2.4 P4 Xeons, talk about a smoking system, I'm thinking about building one to replace my Dual K7 Thunder Domain controller or 3D Workstation, takes up to 24GB of DDR, 7 x 64bit 100Mhz PCI-X slots for upcoming PCI-X cards=4 channel U320 SCSI RAID and Gigabit or Fiber Ethernet cards As far as PIII go, Dual is your only option, not enough L2 cache to support more than 2 without being dog slow.

 

[dexvx]

Originally posted by: Beeker35
If you want Quad CPU's, check out the new Tyan Thunder GC-HE S4520 Quad Xeon board with 4 x 2.4 P4 Xeons, talk about a smoking system, I'm thinking about building one to replace my Dual K7 Thunder Domain controller or 3D Workstation, takes up to 24GB of DDR, 7 x 64bit 100Mhz PCI-X slots for upcoming PCI-X cards=4 channel U320 SCSI RAID and Gigabit or Fiber Ethernet cards As far as PIII go, Dual is your only option, not enough L2 cache to support more than 2 without being dog slow.

Those are XeonMP processors. Currently the best one is a 1MB cache 1.8Ghz. I dont even think they are for sale through retail channels, but a 1MB cache 1.6Ghz runs about $3700 each.