Windows 7 Home Premium - how many physical CPUs supported ?

Tuvoc

Tuvoc

Tuvoc

Soldato
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19 Dec 2002
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I'm getting conflicting search information on this. Has anyone actually tried Windows 7 Home Premium on a dual socket motherboard ? Will it support 2 physical CPUs or is it restricted to one ?
 
only one for home premium mate, from what i read and was told on here u can have as many cores as u want, hyperthreading dont matter but only one CPU.


it will run but u will just lose all the cores of one under windows i think
 
Wikipedia isn't always right.. but that's what I mean by confusion exists.

XP Home always only supported one, and you needed XP Prof for 2 CPUs. I really wanted some first hand experience from someone who has tried it. It seems logical that W7 Home Premium would only support one, and you'd need Professional for 2, that would be consistent. Best to buy W7 Professional to be safe.
 
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Well the license agreement for Home Premium is confusing as it actually says "up to two processors"

Strange. I'd still go for Pro though.
 
run system config and under the boot tab go to advanced options and see how many processors it lists.
 
http://social.answers.microsoft.com...l/thread/26dd0832-eafe-42b0-ad9d-b32cf0c2195e

http://social.answers.microsoft.com...e/thread/01bf018e-c1c4-4cb5-99fe-3091731080c9

It would seem Home Premium and below only support 1 socket, despite what the EULAs say. Strikes me they were a copy and paste and someone didn't bother to check! :p

Nearly everywhere I have looked, notably the MS Answers forum, the MVPs/Mods/whatever have said it is 1 socket in Home Premium.

Though to be honest, if you had workstation/server class hardware why would you want to install a Home version of Windows? Pro isn't that much more expensive if you look around.

@ bru: You are incorrectly assuming he already has Windows Home Premium installed. In which case he could just open his taskmanager to see if it is utilizing all the CPUs. He wants to know before he buys and/or installs it! :p
 
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I'm looking at the Microsoft Press book in front of me called "Configuring Windows 7" for my MCITP exam I'm working towards, and it does say Home Premium supports two physical processors. Very strange. Might have to e-mail Microsoft on this and ask them the reason as to why their own stuff says two, but it actually only handles one.
 
Thanks everyone. I think the answer is that it only supports one, but even Microsoft's own documentation is incorrect and says two.

I decided to stick with XP Professional in the end :eek:
 
Hikari Kisugi said:
XP Pro?
Really?

Which motherboard are you utilizing btw? and for what purpose?

/nosy
Click to expand...

The assumption above was that a dual socket motherboard was a high end system. In fact it is a seven year old Dual Athlon MP 2800 box, MSI K7D Master mobo, two CPUs of one core each. Runs amazingly well still. The 2GB of RAM certainly helps there (4 x 512MB ECC). XP Prof seemed to have become corrupted after all that time, but couldn't locate the disk since it was so long ago. I thought I would have to buy again (either XP Prof or W7) but then my brother finally found the original CD. This box has pretty much run 24/7 for all that time mostly under full load, a real testament to the quality of the board, RAM and CPUs. Of course hard drives are not original, neither is the video card or DVD drive. After the re-install, runs beautifully once more.
 
I never said it was high-end. I said it was server or workstation-class. Just because it's 7 years old doesn't mean a Home version of Windows will support it. :)
 
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