The only real purpose of a Dual CPU stuff was workstation/server things. I have never used a Dual Pentium rig so i dont know, but can the games even use the 133mhz from the other CPU? I would figure no.

DOS and Win9x cannot use the second CPU. Multi-CPU support exists only in NT and derived OS, Linux etc.

Interesting this has Windows 95 then. So the second CPU must be completely unused. I can't say a retro server is very interesting to me and there wouldn't be any retro Linux gaming options. Especially from that time period.

Such a cool system I've seen a couple of posts about Dual original Pentiums. The unfortunately thing is there isn't a whole lot of practical use cases for a system like this. There is no point in running DOS/Win95/98 on it because it won't use the second CPU. You could run NT or Linux on it but Whatever you would want to use it for would run better on a Dual P2/P3 or even newer.

Basically you have a very cool system, but not really any retro gaming application that another less rare system would;t do better.

I'd say keep it and use it just because it's cool. Use it as a standard dos box and dualboot NT4.

Yeah a DOS/NT4 would be a cool system. OR im sure you could get some very good money for this system. Socket 8 systems are rare these days.

I'm currently here with a dual socket 8 and even with NT I can't think of any Windows games that even remotely considered a PC having more than one CPU. I don't think there really were any games that supported multiprocessing until much, much later but someone please correct me if wrong.

Stuff developed on NT like Baldurs Gate 1/2 /might/ use both, but I doubt it.

Wish there was more documentation on early "Dual Core" games. I guess dual core stuff didnt become popular in PC gaming till the Core 2 Duo/Athlon 64 x2 came out.

There were quad-socket original Pentium servers available. SCO UNIX, Novell NetWare, and Windows NT 3.x were the commonly-used OSes for it at the time. (NetWare was an interesting case, because it ran OVER MS-DOS, vaguely similar to Windows non-NT, only it was capable of using multiple processors because of the way its kernel replaced DOS's.)

But as you can see from the list of OSes, not much in the way of gaming value.

As Trank suggests, there were extremely few multi-CPU-capable games until the dual-core era (Pentium D, Athlon X2.) One of the few I can think of from before 2004 is Quake III Arena. (I was working at Intel at the time it came out, and we ran it on an 8-way Pentium III Xeon Server with a workstation-grade video system that consisted of three 64-bit PCI cards that each had two Voodoo 3 chips all working together in massive 6-way SLI.

Yes, a ridiculous amount of overkill, considering a single Pentium III with a single Voodoo 3 could run it perfectly fine - but it was fun to set up. (And our boss took it to a server conference to show off what "Intel servers can do".)

If the motherboard is supported by BeOs, you can find games to play and see if they perform differently with one or both cpu active.

In Windows NT even if game doesn't use the other CPU, OS will and game should run more smoothly on such a system.

There were some multithreaded games - Galactic Civilisations 1 & 2 for OS/2 definitely was. So, if you get hold of a copy of eComstation, Warp Server with the SMP module, or OS/2 2.11 for SMP, it could probably be used.

Links for OS/2, Simblob and a few other games are also multithreaded. Galciv 2 is a great game, but that's a rather specialist case. You'd be better running it on a modern machine in a VM.

I have an Abit BP6 loaded with dual Mendocino Celeron 533s, and even that thing won't really keep up in anything outside of Quake III Arena, which notably is multithreaded for a 1999 game. Everything else that could take advantage of dual CPUs properly came about in the Athlon 64 X2 and Core 2 era - orders of magnitude faster architectures.

Meanwhile, Unreal Tournament chugs on that same system, clearly begging for a 1+ GHz CPU. I guess that's what lack of HT&L and multithreading does for you.

There's also the original release of Falcon 4.0, which is said to be multithreaded to a fault if I recall the statements over in the BMS forums correctly. It was a common benchmark for dual-CPU Macs as well as PCs at the time, and the Classic Mac OS doesn't even really support multiple CPUs like a proper preemptive multi-tasking OS would. Everything runs strictly on one CPU unless you've got a multiprocessing-aware app, so you don't really get any responsiveness benefits just by having two CPUs.

I suppose you can toy around with Windows NT on it and enjoy the added responsiveness, but then you deal with the numerous retrogaming incompatibilities that the entire Windows NT lineage brings with it, especially in pre-2000 versions that were never marketed for home use.

I wonder if some early Linux games supported multithreading. FreeCiv, maybe?

Anonymous Freak wrote:

As Trank suggests, there were extremely few multi-CPU-capable games until the dual-core era (Pentium D, Athlon X2.) One of the few I can think of from before 2004 is Quake III Arena. (I was working at Intel at the time it came out, and we ran it on an 8-way Pentium III Xeon Server with a workstation-grade video system that consisted of three 64-bit PCI cards that each had two Voodoo 3 chips all working together in massive 6-way SLI.

Yes, a ridiculous amount of overkill, considering a single Pentium III with a single Voodoo 3 could run it perfectly fine - but it was fun to set up. (And our boss took it to a server conference to show off what "Intel servers can do".)

Damn... That is actually really cool. Any chance you remember the benchmarks? Like what kind of FPS could you get with that system. I wonder how long it took for our PCs to catch up to that system.

Galactic Civilzations on OS/2 sounds interesting! The wikipedia article on OS/2 games was tiny though.

I guess I could install NT on it just for curiosity's sake. I wonder just how much a dual processor system improves performance.

Anonymous Freak wrote:

There were quad-socket original Pentium servers available. SCO UNIX, Novell NetWare, and Windows NT 3.x were the commonly-used […]
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There were quad-socket original Pentium servers available. SCO UNIX, Novell NetWare, and Windows NT 3.x were the commonly-used OSes for it at the time. (NetWare was an interesting case, because it ran OVER MS-DOS, vaguely similar to Windows non-NT, only it was capable of using multiple processors because of the way its kernel replaced DOS's.)

But as you can see from the list of OSes, not much in the way of gaming value.

As Trank suggests, there were extremely few multi-CPU-capable games until the dual-core era (Pentium D, Athlon X2.) One of the few I can think of from before 2004 is Quake III Arena. (I was working at Intel at the time it came out, and we ran it on an 8-way Pentium III Xeon Server with a workstation-grade video system that consisted of three 64-bit PCI cards that each had two Voodoo 3 chips all working together in massive 6-way SLI.

Yes, a ridiculous amount of overkill, considering a single Pentium III with a single Voodoo 3 could run it perfectly fine - but it was fun to set up. (And our boss took it to a server conference to show off what "Intel servers can do".)

If you have any more info about these 64bit Voodoo 3 SLI cards I'm sure there are several people here who would like to know more. I've never heard of such a thing.😮

OpenGL games will work on NT4 or early DX games DX5 and older. That gives some options for gaming with it.