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clv101

clv101

clv101

Soldato
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
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Bristol
Now that lots of software is properly multithreaded in order to take advantage of duel and quad core CPUs, how come we aren't seeing more duel socket motherboards?

For people doing things that justify getting a quad chip (tasks that respond linearly) wouldn't duel socket boards be attractive? Especially if two slightly lower spec and therefore much cheaper CPUs could be used to get eight cores.

So what are the options for duel socket boards? Any decent reviews/tests etc?

OcUK don't sell any!
 
Asus have a few socket 1366 Xeon based dual socket boards. Just looking at another site and some are in-stock starting in the £230 region.
 
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Most of them are server boards, so no overclocking and generally using ecc ram. Some desktop boards are about, but widespread adoption is I believe mainly limited by the price of the processors.

Certainly I'd be very interested in a dual socket i7 board, but they seem to cost more than twice what the single socket ones do (after considering processors). This may have changed since I looked a few months ago I'm also a bit doubtful of successfully overclocking a dual socket board though more than willing to be proved wrong on that count.
 
Hmm... seems to me there might be a market for a duel socket board that takes regular i7 chips and non-party RAM. Where's the old ABit when you want them?

My brother had a duel board from ABit many years ago with two 366MHz Celerons in it, that was great.
 
The Supermicro X8DAi and similar seems to work with unbuffered DIMMs, however you have to use Xeon CPUs... where something like the Xeon L5520, Gainestown, 2.26 GHz is around £400. Seems high when the 2.66 GHz i7 920 is more like £200.

Is there anything fundamental that stops the non Xeon chips working in a dual config?
 
Sort of. The xeon chips have two qpi links, one communicates with the ram and the other with the second processor. In the desktop chips the second link is lasered off. I don't know if it's possible to connect them without qpi or not, 775 (771?) chips coped but I'm not clear on how.
 
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