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Hardware

Building an Upgradable Dual Processor System 25

Posted by Cliff from the buying-SMP-that-isn't-obsolete-3-months-later dept.
AntMan asks: "OK. I am building a new system for myself. Now checking on pricewatch.com I noticed that Dual processor motherboards can be had for under $100. My budget was $800 tops. But on doing some research I realized that I could build a 866 Mhz dual Celeron system in that much with change left over. But when I looked on Anandtech, Aceshardware, and tomshardware, I found very few reviews/guides for building dual processor systems. Additionally I wanted to build a system, in which I can put in a couple of cheap 433MHz celerons PPGAs, and hopefully upgrade to a couple of 1GHz PIIIs when the price is right (in about a year or so). So my question is ... Is this possible? And what MB would people recommend?"
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Building an Upgradable Dual Processor System More

Building an Upgradable Dual Processor System

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  • As I type this on my Abit BP6, dual Celeron 366 o/c to 550, 128 MB RAM, 13 GB Ultra66 drive, running Debian potato...

    Nah, it's a total rumor. It can't be done.

    :-)

    (BTW, the board, chips, RAM, and drive came to about $600 with shipping for me in Nov '99. And that was with priority shipping, too.)
  • Good recommendations but who knows how long it will be before you can get a machine based on a four-way or eight-way Crusoe motherboard. My guess is that this is more than a year off.

    Go with the ABIT BP6 with Celerons for now. It's clearly the best bang for the buck. When it comes time to upgrade buy a new motherboard and CPUs and reuse all of your other existing components.

  • Or, just invest the money in memory and minimize the swapping bottleneck all together.

    He didn't say what OS he was using, but Windows2000 looks like it will be comfy with 128MB, minimum, and would probably be happier at 256MB (especially if you are doing light web serving, etc.). Flame on, but the memory is going to you a lot more good even under Linux than a second CPU.
    --
  • I was in your same boat just last year.

    I ended up with:
    Supermicro P6DBE mobo
    Adaptec Jumpered Slotkets w/433mhz Celerons & cooling fans (bought from computernerd.com)
    128 meg SDRAM
    SBLIVE!
    several HD's, standard floppy
    Matrox Millenium G200 AGP 8megs

    Installing RedHat 6.0 was problematic, it wouldn't recognize the dual celerons. 6.1, however, had no problems at all and I've been happy ever since. NT 4.0 also works well, recognizes both CPU's, etc, and BeOS has no problems either. Also note that the SBLive! driver for Linux is not available for the SMP kernel, which means if you want to use the audio, you'll have to boot NT or BeOS or select another card for now.

    If I built a new system tomorrow, I'd use the Abit BP6 board, as it's more customizable in the realm of OC, etc. The benefit of the Supermicro is that you can upgrade to "real" PII's, if you get the urge. The only reason I didn't use the BP6 to begin with was the simple fact that the BP6 came out about a month after I bought my mobo. I'd also use the Matrox G400 for video, as I've always been happy with Matrox products.

    Best of luck to you,

    Rinikusu


  • You didn't say anything about what OS, but here's a page [nlug.org] about running Linux on SMP motherboards.

    FWIW, I had more or less the same idea as you. I bought a SuperMicro P6DGE for the following reasons:

    • Cheap - $235
    • Supports SMP
    • Supports 1G RAM
    This model doesn't have on-board SCSI (that's why it was cheap), but it does have two IDE controllers. I didn't want to lay out a lot of cash at once, so I started with a single slot 1 Celeron 333, and one 128 MB RAM chip.

    Since I was upgrading from a 486 DX2/66 20 MB RAM laptop, I figured it would be a while before I would be wishing it were faster. I'm still pretty pleased with its performance - it takes maybe 5 or 10 minutes to build a kernel. (I don't know - it's too long to sit there and stare at it though.)

    There are a couple of ways I considered upgrading the processors:

    1. Determine the fastest PII/PIII that the MB will handle, and as soon as Intel stops making them, buy a pair. I figure that'll be the cheapest/fastest processors I can put on that MB.
    2. Get some Socket 370/Slot 1 converters at about $15 each, and a couple of fast Celerons.
    Anyone else have any other suggestions for cheaply going to dual-processors?
  • My trusty Abit-BP6 box has dual celeron 400s in it. I built the whole thing for about $700 about six months ago. It's not loaded, but does have a TNT2 card and an 8gb Maxtor IDE drive.

    I've got a couple of friends who bought the dual 366s and regularly overclock them. I decided not to, just because the machine is pretty darned zippy anyway. I'd rather a machine run reliably at 400 mhz than to crash even once at 550. They have had varying luck, one friends computer crashes about once a week, the others seem to be doing just fine.

    Frankly, I think the whole upgradeability thing is highly overrated. Buy the computer you want now, and then buy the computer you want next year next year. Increases in memory speed, disk capacity and the like will make it really not worthwhile to pick and choose your upgrade.
  • I've been looking into the same sort of thing... so far I have found Abit's BP6 (rev 2) to be pretty cool... dual celeron ppga, etc. Supposedly, you can overclock celeron 366 ppga to 550 or so with no trouble. This place [advnacedesignky.com] will sell you the board & chips for $320. Anybody tried this out?
  • Your chance of getting the BP6 to work with Copermines has changed from unlikely to impossible according to this message from abit I found at bp6.com

    ".. i just wanted to update you so you could let people on the site know that the BP6 will NOT be able to support coppermines. That will not happen, there are also rumors of an adapter card. We have no such card in the plans. Originally it was thought that maybe we could get it to work with a BIOS update, but that has proven to be not true. The reason is because of 2 areas, both controled by Intel. One is the VRM spec, which controls voltage regulation, the other is the pin-outs between the Celerons and CUmines, both different. So even a single processor Cumin capability will not be availble for the BP6 much less dual capability."

  • I also run a MSI 6120 motherboard, and I have had it for a little more than a year ago (I think), with absolutely no problems. MSI recently put out a new bios for it that fixed ACPI problems, and windows 2000 likes it even better now (although now that the beta is over I may revert to Linux on this box).

    Stability is great, amazing actually, consindering that I have a pair of overclocked P2-350's (running at 392mhz), and I commonly have uptimes of a month or more in windows 2000, which is truly mind boggling.

    of course, my hacked-together linux box with an overclocked P150 currently has 120 days of uptime... so I guess it's not so amazing...
  • I want to know if in the computer market if possible to build a system that have a cuple of AMD k7.... i am sure that i will need an special mother board... where i can find info about that?
  • Where I work we have a mailserver running with two 466mhz celerons on a bp6 mobo,256mb of cas2-memory. It's benn up for ~90 days and was brought down just for fitting another NIC in to it. So I'd say it's fairly stable, at least if you use non-cheap memory.

  • I've seen many upgradabout systems. I've never seen anyone upgrade one. Tommorows technology makes it into the mobotherboard rather quickly, and you turn out to want that.

    Besides, how do you know what will come. A guy at church keeps complaining to me that he bought a PII-233, and the motherboard is documented to go up to 500mhz. He can't do it though, because when they released the chips faster then 300 intel changed the rules slightly. (I'm not sure if it is voltage, bus speed or something else)

    I would say that you are best off buying a good system now, and putting a network card in it. When you buy the greater system in a few years everything will change. (Maybe it will be athalon, or maybe the successer) with a simple network you have either a comptuer in the living room and the den, or at least a comptuer for good head to head gaming when friends come over.

    That aside, I bought a dual ppro a couple years ago, and the only thing that makes me consider replacing it is the fan noise. And I in fact followed my philsophy, the 386 the ppro replaced is still running in a closet somewhere - it still has my USR courior modem and I got email last night) Granted it can't do much by todays standard, but if I'm ever in that closet I have a terminal.

  • I was in the mood to upgrade in November. After serious consideration, I got an Abit BP6 w/ two Celeron 366's (as opposed to an Athlon). I'm now running it overclocked to 550 MHz.

    Besides the aforementioned stuff, I also got 128 MB of PC100 and an IBM 13 GB Ultra66 drive for about $600 with priority shipping. I had a spare case, and most of the rest got cannibalized from the old system and other spare parts (who doesn't have spare 3.5 floppy drives laying around :-).

    I've been very satisfied with its performance - although, if it makes any difference, this was an upgrade from a P233, so just about anything new would seem good. I expect it will last me for quite a while, or at least until the other LUG guys upgrade. :-)

    In defense of the BP6 in the face of the Celeron's future, there are (supposedly) other chip makers coming out with PPGA processors, at least some of which should work with it. If they work out, the BP6 should clock up to at least the lower end of the spectrum for these new chips.
  • It will surely be better to get a MB now that works well for your Celerons (66MHz FSB, PC66 SDRAM) and save any money you can. then dump the lot and buy a new MB and memory when you buy your new processors. By then you will want 133 or 166 MHz FSB (or something) or you might want to go the Athlon route, and who knows what memory will do.

    Get what you need now and plan on replacing it all -- you'll get a better system for little more money
  • You're in a bit of a quandary. First, the 370 pin PPGA socket for Celeron processors is not compatible with the FC-PGA Pentium III coppermines. Abit is releasing a SlotKet III which supposedly will fit both PPGA Celerons and Coppermines in a Slot1 motherboard, but regressing to Slot1 seems a bit pointless ATM considering where everything is headed. I would tell you to wait a few months for FC-PGA Celerons to be released and buy a compatible motherboard, but unfortunately Intel is disabling SMP on the new edition Celerons. If you really have your heart set on upgrading, I suppose you could get a good Slot1 SMP motherboard and slocket Celeron 370PPGAs for now and see what happens with the FC-PGA->Slot1 converters. Otherwise, hey, motherboards are cheap, and for the price of 2 P3-1Ghz chips you could probably score a couple of P3-950s and a shiny new mobo with all the bells and whistles. In other words, I wouldn't get my heart set on upgrading, which is increasingly looking to be an antiquated concept.

    --
  • I am running a BP6 with celerons overclocked to 550, and am happy with it. Unfortunately, it has been more or less decided that the BP6 will not be ably to run Pentium !!!s. The hardwae is incompatible, so your only real solution is a Slot 1 motherboard. While they will (supposedly) have adapter cards to run the new socket P!!!, don's rely on compatibility.

    I would recommend the BP6 for now, and get a board built for the socket P!!!s later. It will be inexpensive now, ant the money you saved now will get you better hardware later.

    Right now intel's in a big transition, heck, even the Celerons will be updated to run (officially) on a 100 MHz bus sometime. You may just want to take a wait-and-see approach.

    -Smitty
    1. I run an ASUS P2B-DS [asus.com] with two PII/300s and two IBM ultrawide SCSI disks. The machine is bombproof and very fast. This is my desktop machine and is used largely for Java development - none of our servers have or need anything like this performance.
    2. However, I wouldn't build or buy a new machine just now. I'm waiting to see whether anyone is going to put together a four-way or eight-way Crusoe [transmeta.com] motherboard and if so what it will cost. The Crusoe is a much smaller die than the Pentium and consequently is very much cheaper to produce. This doesn't mean it will be sold cheaper, but it could be; I'm prepared to bet the real production cost of eight Crusoes is significantly less than two PIIIs
  • sorry about the tpyo, the link is this [advanceddesignky.com].
  • I think that Tyan is the only manufacturer so far that is coming out with a dual processor board. It will apparently be called the dolphin, this according to www.slota.com/motherboards.

    Tyan itself is, as usual, saying nothing about it at all. Release date is listed as '00, so it may be december for all slota.com knows...
  • What you want to do is very possible. I had the same situation.
    I bought one CPU to start out with and built up my system, knowing that I didnt want to replace my mobo. I have the Microstar 6120 [msicomputer.com], its a dual slot1 mobo with onboard adaptec scsi. I bought it 3 years ago (phew) right when the BX chipset came out. It is relatively inexpensive in its class and is rock solid. It has bus speeds Auto/100/112/133 so it can take all sorts of cpus. I have been running on dual PII-450s recently. My friend is using a Shuttle 649A [spacewalker.com] with a P3 and that motherboard (imho) is not as stable. My system has been runing rock solid using the Microstar. Specs here, and a great price [zdnet.com]

    I bought my cpus from Step-Thermodynamics [step-thermodynamics.com] which I have absolutely nothing to complain about. The coolers on those are simply the best. They add a ton to the stablity and performance (I got the 400-450 step).

    Good luck in finding what you need
    -Chris
  • I've built a lot of computer systems and my advice to you is to forget about the dual processors and go for SCSI. Unless you're going for hardcore processing power (which normal users generally aren't; except for gamers, of course), stick with one 433 celeron and drop some extra cash on SCSI. You can get a card for about $140 plus a small hard drive (2GB) for $100. You may want to check ebay for an even better deal. Believe me, the difference between using IDE for your main drive vs. SCSI is unbelievable! It's definitely worth the extra cash!

  • Don't worry about the mainboard... (Score:3)

    by MrHat ( 102062 ) on Monday January 24, 2000 @09:30AM (#1344287)
    ...it's probably going to be the cheapest (or nearly the cheapest) part of an evolving system. Although your specs did seem somewhat low-budget (e.g. no SCSI), follow a couple simple rules to ensure upgradablilty:

    • Just say no to integrated components
      Integrated or on-board components, such as video, ethernet, and sound are Bad Things (tm). You may be tossing the main board in about a year, you don't want to lose half of your "cards" with it. As far as I can tell, the PCI spec will be in force much longer than any processor bus/slot spec.

    • Fast RAM, Fast Bus
      If you can, get faster RAM or a motherboard that supports faster bus speeds. 133mHz RAM (PC-133) will work on 66, 100, and upcoming 133mHz boards. When you upgrade, that'll be one less component to throw away.

    • Balance cost with upgradability
      Think (for each individual component) if it will cost you more to fend off obselence by paying more, or to simply buy a new SuperMegaDevice 2002 to replace your 2000 model. Celeron processors (which you seemed decided on) are a good example - they're amazingly cheap, with almost little or no performance penalty. You can buy four or five for the price of one high-powered Pentium III chip, and the PIII may only last you 2-3 more months.

    Good luck with the building.

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