Dual Processor Motherboard. better or no?

[UltraMagnus]

I'm building a computer from scratch and was wondering if having a computer with dual processors. (for sake of arguement, lets say each processor is 1ghz Athlon). Would it really make a difference in gaming or would it feel about the same? I'm under the impression that the workload would be balanced out between the two? Someone with some info would be appreciated...thanks.

[Molecule Man]

Yes, and no. Most games are not written for SMP, so there will be minimal benefit even though the OS supports it.

You are probably considering the Tyan Tiger as it is the only reasonalby priced Mobo for mere mortals. It is a good board, but dam expensive. At $260, it is more than $100 for what I paid for both my Mobo, and CPU. And it has onboard LAN and Sound. Iwould wait for a Dualie untill some other Manufactors start producing boards.

[MBMarduk]

I recently bumped into a lot of SMP articles WITH benchmarks, so Googling for "dual processor smp result benchmark" is what _I'd_ suggest.

Apparently SMP isn't all that great for games because of the OS-overhead.
I've read you'll get about 10-15% more power out of it, instead of the nonsensical 100% most bozos expect.
SMP is still king for web- and dataservers.

Price-performance-wise I'd stick my money in a cool new UNIproc box.

[slacker_x]

If you are only concerned about games, buy a single processor system. Say an AMD 1.4 GHZ.

You will save a lot of money on the CPU and the motherboard. You may know this already, but the CPUs required for SMP are more expensive than the regular CPUs

If you go the single CPU route, you can upgrade your computer a year or two later with the money you saved.

[UltraMagnus]

Sounds good. Thanks for the info. I'll stick with the single processor for now. Later everyone.