As I said then.......

 

you talking mp unlock or multiplier unlock? I have been on a P4 for 3 months now.

 

Sorry Mr Footlong thought thats what you said ...its late

 

You are right too mate about L3 if you are talking about multiplier unlocking the latest xp's

Cheers,

Nick

 

if you are considering multiprocessing, scan have a special today only on multiprocessing motherboards http://www.scan.co.uk/todayonly/

 

stevebt, as already stated you may not want an MP, even if you want to do multi processing you can use an XP processor. they are THE SAME! just an unlock required.

read this and also check the benchmark graphs:
http://www.gamepc.com/labs/view_cont...Ftest=1&bhcp=1

In actual reality, having two processors gives between a -10% to +50% performance increase over a single processor, depending on application. This is supported in the graphs in the review. This means it might be better to just get a faster single CPU and/or overclock.

Also if you decide to go the multi processing route, you dont have a large choice of motherboards, and the boards that are available are not as overclocking friendly as some of the more recent single processing board. I was considering dual processing, but in the end decided to go for a single processor(Athlon XP2400), with an overclock friendly board (ASUS A7V8X) and some decent memory.

[Edited by Eagle7 - 11/12/2002 2:30:04 AM]

 

It is not a question of clocking them. Basically, Athlons, Durons, XP's and MP's have a lot of what are called 'bridges' on the top of them surrounding the core. Basically just metal dots joined togetherwith a metal line, hence the name bridge.

They are grouped together with names such as 'L1','L2' etc next to them. Basically, thes make it easy for AMD to crank these out of the main FAB and tell them what exactly they are, as in what the main fsb speed should be set to, what multiplier they should be run at, what default voltage they run at etc.

Now, the XP's were 99.9%identical except for 1 solitary bridge that was cut by AMD. This is all that tells a modern PC that it is not a MP chip. Join the bridge back and the Motherboard will accept the cpu as capable/accepted for mp use.They don't always report them as MP's, as some bioses are pretty smart.

Now, this isn't quite that easy anymore, as AMD when changing to the XP core, altered the chips from ceramic packaging to organic packaging. One of the advantages for them was that they could easily not only cut the bridges, but actually burn very precise troughs into the area where the bridge was with a laser, making it no where near as easy to rejoin.

At least you only have 1 bridge to fill/join, as to unlock the frequencies on them, you have to fill and join 4 that are all next to each other. I have done a few of these and trust me, to do a perfect professional job takes a lot of patience.

I can't remember if the newer cored Durons now have the MP bridge available or not, but they don't perform all that great in MP form anyway.


Cheers,

Nick



[Edited by Mr Footlong - 11/12/2002 7:12:31 PM]