Ok. What kind of hard drive should I use? This seems like a complex subject.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Western-Digital-WD800 … 3IAAOSwLN5WjVkt something like this that still has the old Molex power connector with a cap over it that you can remove.

What size should I look for (windows XP).

80gb would most likely be large enough for you. A typical fully updated XP SP3 install is around 3gb or so, most XP era games take up 200-1gb of space. Even if you start running low you could always buy another larger drive.

Best 462 board? http://www.tyan.com/product_board_detail.aspx?pid=459

2 > 1

But could I game on it? It seems most server boards aren't good for gaming.

Jupiter-18 wrote:

But could I game on it? It seems most server boards aren't good for gaming.

Yeah, why not? Fastest stock multiprocessor Athlon is the 2800MP, you could run it in Win 2000 or XP.

Another member has a machine based on the A7M266-D, which has the same chipset as this Tyan - Athlon MP build!

Ooh! SO GETTING ONE!

I have both the tyan and a MSI Master K7D looks like this: http://www.on-wing.de/Bilder/msi2.jpg

I used both with a voodoo 5, and both performed excellent. Naturally the MSI allowed overclocking where the tyan did not, but the tyan has a lot more neat features, and I don't overclock old machines anyway.

I paired the board with 2gb of KRX3200K2/1G kingston ram. you must use ecc/reg ram! The model # i linked is the fastest you can buy. yes 1gb modules exist, but are slower. http://www.ebay.com/itm/390179786178

for gaming an nforce 2 setup will easily outperform the dual solutions...

2 cpu for life. Two testicles are better than one, right?

I don't know, man. I prefer a single core for compatibility reasons as well as single threaded performance. I don't do enough multitasking on retro PC's to place value on parallel processing, and messing with core affinity gets old.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/ATI-Radeon-9800-xt-25 … KsAAOSwIgNXkr1I

luckybob wrote:

2 cpu for life. Two testicles are better than one, right?

^THIS

Is managing two CPUs difficult? It seems like there might be some compatibility issues, as well as setting up the OS to take advantage of the two processors.

nforce4max wrote:

luckybob wrote:

2 cpu for life. Two testicles are better than one, right?

^THIS

Depends on what you use them for. 😁

the main problem is that the software you are going to run is most likely only made for 1 CPU/Core and the chipset on those dual socket boards is nowhere near as good as the nforce 2, or even stuff like KT333.

much lower FSB, memory performance and so on...

It seems like XP is the earliest home OS to support Multi-CPU systems. Do ME or 98 support that? Not that I'd use them with this, just curious.

Windows NT 3, 4, and 2000 support multi cpus.

But can you game on server OSes?