I bought, rather late an NOS BP6, running it as my daily driver for a period, with dual 366's clocked at 550. Ran like a charm. IIRC it was XP, or maybe I started out with Win2000. For the time it was a very responsive machine. Probably played a bit Colin McRae Rally 2, and Need for Speed from the same period.

I was so happy about it, that I later bought a used one to build a daily driver for my mother (office applications) also running XP, wit a pair of 533's AFAIR.

But I'm really in doubt, wether I had it before or after my Celeron 600@900

Nevertheless, I still own both boards, and bought 4 400 MHz Celerons, hoping that 2 of them will be stable at 600, to build a maximum spec'd BP6. Also have a pair of Golden Orbs to be modified according to http://www.bp6.com/orbs/

You had to have a XP Pro to be able to run the bi-proc boards if I remember well?

I used it in 1999/2000 in my general PC. I was running Windows NT 4.0 and then Linux 2.2.

I used a pair of Celerons 366 (sometimes with overclocking to 550 MHz).

I remember it was quite a problematic board. Furthermore, it was actually quite difficult to use the dual CPU for anything meaningful back in those days. You had to use a non-mainstream OS and even then there were some limitations as to where the second CPU could do something useful. Yes, you could run early distributed computing clients or split your own tasks in multiple processes/threads but that's about it. Even for content media encoders/players it was quite uncommon to use multiple threads back in 2000.

I also remember compiling software using gcc compiler in multiple threads with "make -j" option in 1999/2000. When it worked it was great. But often it failed due to dependency problems and you were back to single thread compilation and investigating why it didn't work...

Often certain hardware drivers didn't work well on SMP system even on Windows NT 4.0. Linux kernel in those days had a big global lock so anytime a process switched to kernel mode it blocked the second CPU. So the performance suffered. Only the first CPU was processing the interrupts otherwise you faced problems. Often distros didn't have SMP enabled kernels so you had to compile your own....

Gaming was also difficult as Windows 98SE was the target OS of pretty much all games back in the days. And it had no SMP support. I remember running Quake II in Linux / Windows NT and even experimenting with some SMP tweaks in the console that were supposed to enable SMP in the quake engine, but there was little or no difference.

Yes in theory it has the horsepower, but a normal single PIII or even overclocked Celeron was just as good if not better.

Later I used it in a internet server. but it was short lived use as I found the board to be unstable for 24x7 use.

I got one back in the day, and hit up Pricewatch for a pair of matched Celerons. I used it to run BeOS since they built the thing with SMP in mind. But, even after investing in all the paraphernalia to water-cool the CPUs, the chipset got SO HOT it made me uncomfortable to leave it running, and it was a pain to maintain it.

Curiosity quenched, it went ... somewhere. Probably Ebay, but possibly someone on Craigslist who didn't even know what they were taking. (sigh)

I had one in 1999/2000, with 2 Celeron 450 running at 490 MHz.
With a Voodoo 3, it was great to play Unreal Tournament on Linux, FreeBSD or Windows 2000 😀

I wanted one soooo bad back in the day. I think most any you find on ebay probably been overlclocked to hell and need a full recap..

mpe wrote:

Yes in theory it has the horsepower, but a normal single PIII or even overclocked Celeron was just as good if not better.

Absolutely true - but then you wouldn't be able to say "I run dual Celerons" .. 🤣