I've picked up a dual CPU copper mine board and it is pointless. It's a fun build and interesting to mess around with but the problem is that the sort of games that like two logical cores are expecting significantly more powerful CPUs.

I put XP on my system with 2x 750MHz CPUs and it's an odd but bearable experience, probably worse than a single p4 1.6GHz.

I'll be trying out games that have minimum requirements greater than 750MHz to see how they run. For instance COD2 expects a 1.4GHz P4 as a minimum CPU but the dual 750s manage 25fps at 1024*768 with a FX 5900XT (DX7 mode) so there is definitely some good usage going on

You need an operating system that supports dual CPU’s like NT 4.0 or Win2000 or WinXP.
So not very good for game play. Dual CPU’s are NOT supported in Win3x or Win95, 98, ME.

Not a good idea for a DOS gaming computer.

swaaye wrote on 2020-07-06, 14:20:

So in other words, yeah if you want to run two heavy duty programs at the same time for reasons, having a separate CPU is nice. I hope that's not surprising and isn't worthy of starting an argument over.

Hyperthreading seemed to be pretty satisfying for some people before dual cores too. I wonder if that would smooth out the above game + server scenario's jitters.

Sometime around 2012 my Non HT P4 would grind to a halt while applying Anti Virus updates. Same OS (XP) and Antivirus McAfee Enterprise 8.5 as previous years.
Obviously with multi core CPU's been common place Mcafee were now happy to tie up one of them for 5-10 minutes during an update. I imagine HT would have coped as really it wasn't that demanding of a task.

chinny22 wrote on 2020-07-06, 16:34:

Sometime around 2012 my Non HT P4 would grind to a halt while applying Anti Virus updates. Same OS (XP) and Antivirus McAfee Enterprise 8.5 as previous years.
Obviously with multi core CPU's been common place Mcafee were now happy to tie up one of them for 5-10 minutes during an update. I imagine HT would have coped as really it wasn't that demanding of a task.

Yeah. That seems like something that could be fixed by running the AV process at low priority? You probably want it to have its own CPU to run on anyway though. The joys of AV.

Outside of about 1 year of my life, I haven't used memory resident antivirus because it's almost as bad as having a virus. I quickly changed to just being more careful of what I installed. But for those who do run AV, I imagine that's the most useful mainstream purpose for dual CPUs back in the P2-P3 days.

dionb wrote on 2020-07-06, 11:04:

Run any CPU-limited game and you hit 100% on one CPU. Run anything else at the same time and something is going to have to wait. […]
Show full quote

Run any CPU-limited game and you hit 100% on one CPU. Run anything else at the same time and something is going to have to wait. That's not rocket science.

But you want a source? How about this:

Use case: you're using MS Office and WinZip and your antivirus program kicks in in the background. That's not an exotic edge-case, it's something that still happens to us daily, and did 20 years ago as well. Instead of "MS Office and WinZip", you can read any game you happen to be running, or indeed burning that CD.

The dual core chip is not twice as fast as the single chip; that's the point. You need to have the need to run multithreaded software or the habit of running multiple programs at once, which, back in the day, was a foolish thing as your computer would crash and your CDs would fail to write and generally you got poor performance when you tried to multitask.

It was only foolish if your hardware couldn't handle it.

That source says nothing about average users and again, it's not compelling. Let's say you are making a CD. Well, how often? How often are you unzipping? And how often is this other task taking up so much CPU that it's slowing the other tasks down?

But like I said, nobody is playing a big game and also doing something else. The game is the task. Or the other thing is. Only power users ever got anything from it, AKA people who didn't close one program before starting another. And I'm not proving your point, I'm saying that people didn't multitask because their hardware couldn't handle it. So when they got these dual core systems it was exactly the same until their use style changed to leaving programs open and trying to do true multitasking. What's the use of two chips if you have 256MB of memory? Exactly how many programs is your hard drive going to serve at once?

Speak for yourself. I multitasked in the 1990s. Every operating system since Windows 3.1 supported it. I ran WinAmp to listen to music while I played a game and that )*&)*^&% virus scanner kicked in at bad times. I was definitely doing that with 128MB RAM. And yes, the experience sucked. Moving from Win9x to 2k improved the experience quite a bit, but the performance hit was there. Add a second CPU and the performance hit was gone. You may have used your PC as a game console not doing anything else, some of us actually used it as a general purpose computer.

I started multitasking with OS/2 Warp 3 on a DX4-100 in 1995. I ran a BBS on RemoteAccess Plus in the background while playing Terror From The Deep in an MS-DOS window in the foreground. I would have possibly done a hit on someone if i twould land me a dual Socket 7 PC. People assume too much.

Benefit of using Dual PIII is having one CPU running OS, Virusscanner etc, where the other can be used for the Game you want to Play!
Most Games back then where not aware of SMP.

Quake 3 can use SMP for Example.

Dual CPU gives me the feeling and the experience of double horsepower in Multitasking Apps. And it fits much more the desire for a special retro built.

Some, maybe the half, of the Q3 engine games support the SMP feature (without crashes) like Q3A. Which results in appr. 20% higher frame rates over a single CPU. So a 1266MHz Tualatin outperforms my Dual PIII 1GHz easily. I like to built special, desiring HW. And for me a Dual-Slot1-PIII-1GHz-Dual-Channel-Rambus-Win2k Workstation is a more desirable Retro PC than a Single-S370-Tualatin-1.4GHz@1.7GHz-VIA-Somewhat PC.

As dionb, luckybob and some other said, it depends on personell preferences of a hobby with the aim to rebuilt obsolete, outdated and overpriced computer.

There's also a dick waving contest and bragging rights aspect of the whole thing which can not be overstated, really..

Anti-virus scanning, CD burning... it's all fine and dandy, but has nothing to do with dedicated oldgaming PC, even if you have some background stuff like Winamp.

appiah4 wrote on 2020-07-07, 10:56:

There's also a dick waving contest and bragging rights aspect of the whole thing which can not be overstated, really..

Absolutely true!

And of course you can run Crysis... it will use both CPUs 😁

In glorius 10 fps! Just like Quake on 486, he he.

Let me ask one question:

With Windows XP, do you think a dual P3 System can utilize the 2 CPUs in games from 2003-2004, like Battlefield 1942, Call of Duty, Need For Speed umderground, Prince of Persia?

Thank You!!

short answer: NO.
Long answer; maybe a LITTLE bit. The game needs to be coded for SMP. If its not, then the only benefit a 2nd cpu will be is about 10% AT BEST. This will only manifest if you have a 2nd program. For sake of argument, you have a cd/dvd emulation software, XP is usually smart enough to run that on a separate processor than the one your game is utilizing. Any sort of OS overhead, that 2nd cpu can handle. So there is a very slight improvement, in some edge cases, but it is never worth the effort , if your goal is win98 games. SMP gaming should only be considered with XP or later titles, specifically ones based of the Quake 3 engine that support SMP, and even then it's an exercise in dick waving.

My dual pentium 3 has brand new cpu's and single sided pc133 ram i enjoy retro games that aren't smp but thats ok because more cpu to keep it stable running SATA RAID USB2 7.1 HD AUDIO Gigabit LAN and also there is plenty of smp data archival compress decompress potentual, encoding video/audio with lighter easier to master retro softwares abandoned and full version available that struggled with 1 cpu and duel systems were druelled at being expensive at the time i lived without it. Its sweet to see a divx full movie video transcode in much less time. Nero 7 turns any xp into a media centre as well. I have RAID 0 running and loading a game like world of warcraft on a private server is very fast and competative even without nvidia. hell 2x agp is just like 8x like the rest of the hype.
The USB2 is especially useful restoring the RAID array from external (though i backup it hasn't broken its stripe prolly due to scottys warp engine maintenance.)
It has built in ATA100 RAID capability but the disks a re so fricking old now so those ports run cd/dvd stuff
These old systems are appreciated by those whom lived the moment and came back for a second round. If its appreciated and not overclocked or modded by twits they can last for as long as mine has well over a decade!
Extra juice to run the backwards compatability of todays tech that wasn't around when it was invented makes it cool. Heck just the idea of 2 cpu threads than 1 on a pentium III system and having an easier time running with system security.
But not all dual pentium III's were created equal thats why i prefer Via chipsets than Intel. Nice change from i labels all over the mobo but back then it had more interesting cache capabilities intel and AMD didn't have which IBM missed out on.
Bottom line however it was a better experience for the days of single core cpu's, but idealy multicore cpu's are superior hands down because theres less distance between the cpu's.
So, if its for what you care about don't expect a miracle probably a little bit like 5 to 25% more than a single cpu but having gigabit LAN and SATA RAID a poor pentium III all by itself does slave Abit 😀

Remember facing huge lags when running file sharing software while trying to play fps games back in the early 2000s?
Would that have been mitigated by a second CPU?

Doornkaat wrote on 2021-06-25, 06:06:

Remember facing huge lags when running file sharing software while trying to play fps games back in the early 2000s?
Would that have been mitigated by a second CPU?

Were the FPS games being played against online oponents ?

If so, the blame would likely haven fallen on limited upload bandwidth combined with lack of QOS .