Need mobo for dual MP2000 CPU's for CAD machine.

**John Prophet** · August 22nd, 2002, 12:11 AM

A motherboard with RAID would be nice, usb 2.0 also. Any DDR333 dual MP boards out there. Noticed the Tyan Tiger MPX is only 266 DDR.

Am thinking of RAID 0 setup with western dig 8mb cache drives.

Would a dual MP board be better than a P4 2.53 board? I know the P4 is smoking lately and has a ton of motherboard choices.

Last question. I have seen several articles that seem to factually state that Athlon XP cpu's can be used in dual MP boards if a certain bridge is shorted (by soldering or other method). Is it hard to do and is it worth the risk? I know you void your warranty hehe. But the XP2200 can be had for around $146 at the moment and maybe even lower soon. A couple of XP's in dual configuration could be a smoking setup for a somewhat reasonable price.

I am asking cuz a guy wants our shop to build him an $8000 cad system...$4000 budgeted for monitor (24" lcd) so that leaves $4g for rest of stuff.

Are 64bit and 66mhz PCI slots of any use in CAD or mostly for servers only?

Thanks, JP

**PresterJohn** · August 22nd, 2002, 12:28 AM

for that big a budget ($8000), nix any idea of bridging the XP chips and just buy the MPs.

the 66mhz slots will yield some extra speed on the network throughput (dependent on the card of course).

the 64bit slots will only be of use if you go with a high end scsi controller. not sure if there are 64bit ide controllers and basically for this level of spending and desired performance, scsi would be best (fastest) anyways.

**woodbutcher** · August 22nd, 2002, 12:43 AM

John
Geeks has this

http://www.compgeeks.com/details.asp?invtid=6A815EPD

I play before I pay!

**John Prophet** · August 22nd, 2002, 02:01 AM

hehe....would be nice if there were room in our shops budget for a little "playful" learning. It is a little rough having to learn on customers expen$ive stuff. Id imagine we'd have to go with IDE RAID cause none of us has ever "played" much with scsi.

JP

**Peter M** · August 22nd, 2002, 03:38 AM

The only dual-MP chipset around is AMD's 760 MPX. You get DDR266, and for best reliability, you should be using the "registered ECC" flavor.

Regarding mass storage, if this thing is supposed to be fast, you want real controller hardware on a 64-bit/66-MHz PCI controller. Consider SCSI, if not SCSI RAID, for mucho improved reliability over IDE (let alone soft-RAID IDE), and for heaven's sake squeeze a backup tape drive into the budget. This one may be IDE, like Onstream's ADR series.

regards, Peter