Will be fun to see if I get my hands on it or not.
It does come with 550mhz cpu's. So it's a ok enough for a starter I guess.

Yes, I wish you luck in grabbing one, dual processor systems are a hell of a lot of fun. I started with 500MHz processors and they were enough to run quite a lot of stuff. You always have the option to sell them later and get something faster.

Seeing as the thread went this way and I'm in a rambling mood, my thoughts on some stuff which was common around here back around the time of the P2B and the present day;

AOpen: Very little experience with these though I generally heard good things. Strangely I never saw them on sale but the only place I found them were in modified Advent branded systems, this was the PC World brand and I never shopped there - preferring a small store called Quay Tek, it was Top Deck Princes Quay (Local Shopping Center), removed with every other small business for a crappy cinema some years back - so perhaps PC World sold them. The one part I have with their name on it as a Riva TNT which has never failed but has horrible signal quality. Strange really the Advent thing, Advent were one of those companies which loved the MSI MS6340, along with Packard Bell and Time... Think Tiny used them too, so generally OEMs that are all dead now. I can't say I blame the owners of these systems for replacing that crap with AOpen stuff, I would have probably done the same if I'd known where it came from.

ABIT: Were pretty good in the Socket A days but I found them to have compatibility issues and don't see many around now which makes me think they were either unreliable or unpopular for some reason. I did like their LED display they stuck to the board though, that at least looked cool.

SolTek: Were common around here, never liked them much. Caps always failed, CPU support was crap and the AGPro slots were always awkward. Last one I used decided to make burning plastic smells after a month of use and I could never get it to work again.

Gigabyte: Designed by donkeys, built by dogs... or something like that. Wouldn't touch them for any amount of money (yes, you could offer to pay me to take them and I wouldn't. Pay me double and I may burn them for you.).

BioStar: Actually used to be OK back in the 386-to-Pentium days, though they were cheaply made they did get the job done well enough. By this point today, with PCChips fading to obscurity after being bought in 2005, they actually look and feel like PCChips stuff... Almost like they want to be their replacement.

DFI: Great boards back in those P3/Athlon days, usually heavily customization oriented and excellent on overclocking ability when coupled with the correct hardware. They still make rather good industrial products which is where I first discovered them. They were good at integration too, systems like the ITOX were exceptionally good.

Intel: Intel boards (Past the Socket 5 days anyway, early ones were awful) will work forever as a rule, but the performance is crappy. Second hand they can sometimes be found cheap and if all you want is a running machine they're OK in that respect, but many seriously lack any ability to upgrade far beyond Intel's idea of the system, one Socket 775 board I have will disable its PCI-E slot if it detects a video card is installed, forcing you to use the onboard GMA. They're my last resort usually but I will pick them up if they're on their way to a trash can as they find uses.

EVGA: Never had one that worked. Every EVGA product I have bought has been DOA - serious, no joke. They do NOT like honoring their warranty either which leads back to what I said before, because I guarantee that this would not happen with a better maker. A good maker has confidence in their product and wants you to come back when you need to upgrade later, they will send a replacement and apologize immediately. EVGA clearly don't fit that category and make a living from selling plastic paperweights - even MSI beat them.

MSI: Just looking at them, you know something is wrong. They're like a slightly less worse version of the current BioStar line-up but that isn't saying much. I think I mentioned before that MSI made one of the worst boards I ever saw. A Celeron only board which has a proprietary slot where the AGP would be... Granted you get a Rage II on-board, but that might not be what I wanted. Still, should make a good machine and I will put it together one day - Celeron 266, the legendary Intel 810 chipset, limited (rubbish) SDRAM support, µATX form factor, onboard CT5880 (One of the worst audio solutions in the world), ATI Rage II which is miles from the header so the image quality is horrible, poor stability, incorrectly labelled jumpers... The list goes on, but it will make an awesome solitaire machine indeed, could maybe be really extreme and get a game of minesweeper going if I can get it to install Windows stably.

QDI: Worth a mention. Today they are just a part of Lenovo, but in times gone by they made good stuff. They usually tried to innovate being early (if not the first) to have jumper-less CPU configuration and an awesome reliability record. The ones I have came from a foundry - so lots of nasty metal dust and sut - they still work great, the only thing that broke was a fan header due to a failed fan shorting it out for years before I got the machine. They always had enough features on them and support was good. Alongside another dead ASUS (Will post a thread soon, would love to fix it) they made the only board I have which can run the VIA C3.

XFX: Just a leech, I don't know that they make anything themselves but rarely do their products work. When they were known as Pine, they used to re-badge PCChips parts, so that tells us what they are like. As noted a few times, strangely their PT-7502 (Re-labelled M520) was great, I guess the designer got bored. Worse than XFX for warranty stuff, they said I had voided the warranty on my DOA MX4000 by opening the box, I had to fix the card myself. Still have the card, it is still faulty. Personally, I dislike buying any product which is sold with less than a three year warranty as the company clearly doesn't think much to their product.

Chaintech: Also deserves a mention. These were good, usually affordable and less overclocker friendly but the latter has never been much of an interest to me. The unusual colors weren't even that ugly (gold plated backplanes! Yellow slots, black board.) and they always worked well with a wide range of hardware. Their graphics cards were pretty good too. I miss them to be honest. They made the ONLY K7 boards I have left running, the others all died horrible deaths.

My personal leaning is towards hardware from 1988-1996 it seems. Mostly 486 stuff. I like to try things from companies you never see anymore, for example. I love Zenith stuff, Everex kicked ass too, Shuttle were good back then (I have never used their later products), Micronics made some good stuff but steer clear of any boards with Intel chipsets for the 486 platform, they suck. Then there are hidden gems that nobody has ever heard of which make it all worthwhile.

@meljor; Now THAT is how you disagree with someone. 😁 That was civil, mature and well reasoned.

I always had lenience towards Compaq's Deskpro line as you did at least have some upgrade options and they were built like tanks. They earned my respect. Most of the systems at my old workplace were PII Deskpro's and I'd love to get one some day. They never broke after I started work and fixed them all up (Close to 1000 systems!) but there were other brands I had to work on. TIme used standard parts but their love of the MSI MS6340M left them with poor reliability - once I was called to the server room (Previous worker had set one up as the server for the satellite internet connection) because the accountants could smell smoke. Damn right there was smoke, it was purple, that thing never ran again and it must have been cursed because I was on the second floor and it fell out of a window while I was working on it, barely missing somebody in the street below. I nailed wooden bars across the window frames at the back of the workbenches after that. When I went to recover the machine it was gone, so who knows where it went and its probably a good thing I had removed the drives. A colleague also knocked a Deskpro out of the window, but it survived with only a damaged hard drive (which was busted anyway, which was why we had it in the repair room) and the CPU had slipped out of its socket. It booted right back up once we pushed that back in and replaced the hard disk with my testbed one. One brand I never saw anywhere else was around that building, TriGem, they were mostly Socket 7 in LPX format. Hottest running Socket 7's I have ever seen, they had a smell to them those ones, ran good enough though.

Ugh, lots of rambling. Meh, sue me.

You can check P2B compatibility here: http://homepage.hispeed.ch/rscheidegger/p2b_p … pgrade_faq.html

You need a P2B-DS rev 1.06, with D03 (written at the bottom of the ISA slots) for mod free coppermine support. I have one of these boards (LNIB actually) but I haven't used it yet.

Ok'.... 😁
I'll sue for one dead rat then... 😁 😁 (joking around)

blank001 wrote:

You can check P2B compatibility here: http://homepage.hispeed.ch/rscheidegger/p2b_p … pgrade_faq.html

You need a P2B-DS rev 1.06, with D03 (written at the bottom of the ISA slots) for mod free coppermine support. I have one of these boards (LNIB actually) but I haven't used it yet.

If you use Coppermine socket 370 CPUs on slotkets with voltage selection you do not need the correct VRM. Coppermine CPUs can handle 1.8V without issues and even 2.0V is OK as long as the cooling can keep up, that is also what your link says 😀

HighTreason wrote:

Yes, I wish you luck in grabbing one, dual processor systems are a hell of a lot of fun. I started with 500MHz processors and th […]
Show full quote

Yes, I wish you luck in grabbing one, dual processor systems are a hell of a lot of fun. I started with 500MHz processors and they were enough to run quite a lot of stuff. You always have the option to sell them later and get something faster.

Seeing as the thread went this way and I'm in a rambling mood, my thoughts on some stuff which was common around here back around the time of the P2B and the present day;

AOpen: Very little experience with these though I generally heard good things. Strangely I never saw them on sale but the only place I found them were in modified Advent branded systems, this was the PC World brand and I never shopped there - preferring a small store called Quay Tek, it was Top Deck Princes Quay (Local Shopping Center), removed with every other small business for a crappy cinema some years back - so perhaps PC World sold them. The one part I have with their name on it as a Riva TNT which has never failed but has horrible signal quality. Strange really the Advent thing, Advent were one of those companies which loved the MSI MS6340, along with Packard Bell and Time... Think Tiny used them too, so generally OEMs that are all dead now. I can't say I blame the owners of these systems for replacing that crap with AOpen stuff, I would have probably done the same if I'd known where it came from.

ABIT: Were pretty good in the Socket A days but I found them to have compatibility issues and don't see many around now which makes me think they were either unreliable or unpopular for some reason. I did like their LED display they stuck to the board though, that at least looked cool.

SolTek: Were common around here, never liked them much. Caps always failed, CPU support was crap and the AGPro slots were always awkward. Last one I used decided to make burning plastic smells after a month of use and I could never get it to work again.

Gigabyte: Designed by donkeys, built by dogs... or something like that. Wouldn't touch them for any amount of money (yes, you could offer to pay me to take them and I wouldn't. Pay me double and I may burn them for you.).

BioStar: Actually used to be OK back in the 386-to-Pentium days, though they were cheaply made they did get the job done well enough. By this point today, with PCChips fading to obscurity after being bought in 2005, they actually look and feel like PCChips stuff... Almost like they want to be their replacement.

DFI: Great boards back in those P3/Athlon days, usually heavily customization oriented and excellent on overclocking ability when coupled with the correct hardware. They still make rather good industrial products which is where I first discovered them. They were good at integration too, systems like the ITOX were exceptionally good.

Intel: Intel boards (Past the Socket 5 days anyway, early ones were awful) will work forever as a rule, but the performance is crappy. Second hand they can sometimes be found cheap and if all you want is a running machine they're OK in that respect, but many seriously lack any ability to upgrade far beyond Intel's idea of the system, one Socket 775 board I have will disable its PCI-E slot if it detects a video card is installed, forcing you to use the onboard GMA. They're my last resort usually but I will pick them up if they're on their way to a trash can as they find uses.

EVGA: Never had one that worked. Every EVGA product I have bought has been DOA - serious, no joke. They do NOT like honoring their warranty either which leads back to what I said before, because I guarantee that this would not happen with a better maker. A good maker has confidence in their product and wants you to come back when you need to upgrade later, they will send a replacement and apologize immediately. EVGA clearly don't fit that category and make a living from selling plastic paperweights - even MSI beat them.

MSI: Just looking at them, you know something is wrong. They're like a slightly less worse version of the current BioStar line-up but that isn't saying much. I think I mentioned before that MSI made one of the worst boards I ever saw. A Celeron only board which has a proprietary slot where the AGP would be... Granted you get a Rage II on-board, but that might not be what I wanted. Still, should make a good machine and I will put it together one day - Celeron 266, the legendary Intel 810 chipset, limited (rubbish) SDRAM support, µATX form factor, onboard CT5880 (One of the worst audio solutions in the world), ATI Rage II which is miles from the header so the image quality is horrible, poor stability, incorrectly labelled jumpers... The list goes on, but it will make an awesome solitaire machine indeed, could maybe be really extreme and get a game of minesweeper going if I can get it to install Windows stably.

QDI: Worth a mention. Today they are just a part of Lenovo, but in times gone by they made good stuff. They usually tried to innovate being early (if not the first) to have jumper-less CPU configuration and an awesome reliability record. The ones I have came from a foundry - so lots of nasty metal dust and sut - they still work great, the only thing that broke was a fan header due to a failed fan shorting it out for years before I got the machine. They always had enough features on them and support was good. Alongside another dead ASUS (Will post a thread soon, would love to fix it) they made the only board I have which can run the VIA C3.

XFX: Just a leech, I don't know that they make anything themselves but rarely do their products work. When they were known as Pine, they used to re-badge PCChips parts, so that tells us what they are like. As noted a few times, strangely their PT-7502 (Re-labelled M520) was great, I guess the designer got bored. Worse than XFX for warranty stuff, they said I had voided the warranty on my DOA MX4000 by opening the box, I had to fix the card myself. Still have the card, it is still faulty. Personally, I dislike buying any product which is sold with less than a three year warranty as the company clearly doesn't think much to their product.

Chaintech: Also deserves a mention. These were good, usually affordable and less overclocker friendly but the latter has never been much of an interest to me. The unusual colors weren't even that ugly (gold plated backplanes! Yellow slots, black board.) and they always worked well with a wide range of hardware. Their graphics cards were pretty good too. I miss them to be honest. They made the ONLY K7 boards I have left running, the others all died horrible deaths.

My personal leaning is towards hardware from 1988-1996 it seems. Mostly 486 stuff. I like to try things from companies you never see anymore, for example. I love Zenith stuff, Everex kicked ass too, Shuttle were good back then (I have never used their later products), Micronics made some good stuff but steer clear of any boards with Intel chipsets for the 486 platform, they suck. Then there are hidden gems that nobody has ever heard of which make it all worthwhile.

@meljor; Now THAT is how you disagree with someone. 😁 That was civil, mature and well reasoned.

I always had lenience towards Compaq's Deskpro line as you did at least have some upgrade options and they were built like tanks. They earned my respect. Most of the systems at my old workplace were PII Deskpro's and I'd love to get one some day. They never broke after I started work and fixed them all up (Close to 1000 systems!) but there were other brands I had to work on. TIme used standard parts but their love of the MSI MS6340M left them with poor reliability - once I was called to the server room (Previous worker had set one up as the server for the satellite internet connection) because the accountants could smell smoke. Damn right there was smoke, it was purple, that thing never ran again and it must have been cursed because I was on the second floor and it fell out of a window while I was working on it, barely missing somebody in the street below. I nailed wooden bars across the window frames at the back of the workbenches after that. When I went to recover the machine it was gone, so who knows where it went and its probably a good thing I had removed the drives. A colleague also knocked a Deskpro out of the window, but it survived with only a damaged hard drive (which was busted anyway, which was why we had it in the repair room) and the CPU had slipped out of its socket. It booted right back up once we pushed that back in and replaced the hard disk with my testbed one. One brand I never saw anywhere else was around that building, TriGem, they were mostly Socket 7 in LPX format. Hottest running Socket 7's I have ever seen, they had a smell to them those ones, ran good enough though.

Ugh, lots of rambling. Meh, sue me.

I agree with you on most points, except for a few.

Asus - the most over-hyped and overestimated manufacturer. Budget boards are horribly unreliable and have very few features. High end boards are usually very fast and feature rich, but can be quirky and unreliable at times. I've seen so many dead high end asus boards (generally Asus Rampage and Maximus boards) it's not even funny. The only high-end Asus board I ever bought lasted forever tough -> a P6T Deluxe witch kept running until last year when I sold it. Very fast board, but a little picky about ram and I was generally happy with it. Other products (video cards, laptops) are a little .... unfinished - for example:
-my sister's DirectCU II R9 280x has all 6400MHz GDDR5 memory chips cooled except for one. That one module does overheat sometimes causing artifacts and WILL kill the board.
- my ROG G751JY is a great machine. It was way cheaper than similar configurations from other companies, is pretty stable and very fast - BUT - firmware is horrible. It will sometimes refuse to boot (it will show the bios screen when turned on). USB 3.0 was broken in bios 206 (detected all 3.0 devices as 2.0) - took them a whole moth to fix and release a new bios version. The machines cooling system is unfinished - of they would have made two breather holes under the laptop, it would have been 5-10 degrees Celsius cooler.

Abit: - I have a few of these - quite rare since they were quite expensive back in the day and only popular with rich PC enthusiasts. Good boards, but can be a little quirky.

Biostar - surprisingly good cheap board witch seem to last forever. I have two in use right now, a p4 board witch runs 24/7 and has been doing so for the last 5 years and a mATX AMD 760 AM3 board witch despite its price has great OC features and is extremely stable. It took my fiancees 2.6GHz athlon X4 to 3.4 stable in daily use. Biostar products never seem to surprise me.

MSI - one of the few manufacturers to design quality boards nowadays. Great layout, great OC support and decent price. I've never had a problem with modern MSI boards - ever - and I used quite a few of them (various models). Sure, old 1999-2004 MSI boards can be piles of crap, but modern boards fill never disappoint. Best price / performance / reliability / design.

Gigabyte - overall mediocre boards. Modern high-end gigabyte boards are very well designed (notably my former GA-X79-UD3 witch is one of the few boards that can take 2 double slot PCI-E cards without suffocating the top card). Quality is "random" - some boards last forever, others can catch on fire or blow up in your face. High-end models are pretty decent.

kanecvr wrote:

I agree with you on most points, except for a few. […]
Show full quote

I agree with you on most points, except for a few.

Asus - the most over-hyped and overestimated manufacturer. Budget boards are horribly unreliable and have very few features. High end boards are usually very fast and feature rich, but can be quirky and unreliable at times. I've seen so many dead high end asus boards (generally Asus Rampage and Maximus boards) it's not even funny. The only high-end Asus board I ever bought lasted forever tough -> a P6T Deluxe witch kept running until last year when I sold it. Very fast board, but a little picky about ram and I was generally happy with it. Other products (video cards, laptops) are a little .... unfinished - for example:
-my sister's DirectCU II R9 280x has all 6400MHz GDDR5 memory chips cooled except for one. That one module does overheat sometimes causing artifacts and WILL kill the board.
- my ROG G751JY is a great machine. It was way cheaper than similar configurations from other companies, is pretty stable and very fast - BUT - firmware is horrible. It will sometimes refuse to boot (it will show the bios screen when turned on). USB 3.0 was broken in bios 206 (detected all 3.0 devices as 2.0) - took them a whole moth to fix and release a new bios version. The machines cooling system is unfinished - of they would have made two breather holes under the laptop, it would have been 5-10 degrees Celsius cooler.

Abit: - I have a few of these - quite rare since they were quite expensive back in the day and only popular with rich PC enthusiasts. Good boards, but can be a little quirky.

Biostar - surprisingly good cheap board witch seem to last forever. I have two in use right now, a p4 board witch runs 24/7 and has been doing so for the last 5 years and a mATX AMD 760 AM3 board witch despite its price has great OC features and is extremely stable. It took my fiancees 2.6GHz athlon X4 to 3.4 stable in daily use. Biostar products never seem to surprise me.

MSI - one of the few manufacturers to design quality boards nowadays. Great layout, great OC support and decent price. I've never had a problem with modern MSI boards - ever - and I used quite a few of them (various models). Sure, old 1999-2004 MSI boards can be piles of crap, but modern boards fill never disappoint. Best price / performance / reliability / design.

Gigabyte - overall mediocre boards. Modern high-end gigabyte boards are very well designed (notably my former GA-X79-UD3 witch is one of the few boards that can take 2 double slot PCI-E cards with ample space between them). Quality is "random" - some boards last forever, others can catch on fire or blow up in your face. High-end models are pretty decent.

My take on this is simple, most hardware aimed at gamers is rubbish but often fun to tinker with.

Asus is not better than many of the others but sometimes they make good products. The whole Asus P6T series as you mentioned is very well built and will last forever. The P6T boards will be the only things left of human civilization after the earth is long gone. The Asus Commando P965 Socket-775 board is also really really good, the rest of their Socket-775 boards not so much.

EVGA do sell alot of crap but their Classified series of products is extremly well built and will also last a very long time even if abused.

Abit made unreliable crap that is often very fun to tinker with.

MSI motherboards seem to have a failure rate close to 100% after 10 years in use. They are probably better these days but their K8 boards and socket 775 boards were really bad quality wise.

I actually like Gigabyte boards from 2007 and newer. Their newer boards suffer from some nasty bugs often related to dual BIOS and USB implementation causing never ending post loops but once you have learned how to fix those they can handle alot of abuse and the general quality is high, on the other hand the BIOS is often terrible. They also totally failed with their UEFI for boards designed for using BIOS but that is something they have in common with other brands. Gigabyte boards from the Pentium 4 and K7/K8 era was mostly really bad. I should also add that I have 0 experience with their cheapest boards, they are probably garbage.

DFI boards were mostly of very high quality but often failed because they allowed insane voltage settings and such which I really liked. I need to add that their Socket-754 boards had caps that only lasted a couple of years while the Socket-939 boards have better caps.

High quality stuff made to last more than 10 years came from board makers like Intel, IBM, Compaq and Fujitsu Siemens but they are also somewhat boring. These days I do not really know as I do not own much stuff made later than 2010.

Damn.... Have to wait until the next weekend.
The seller asked me that he can not ship it before that.

Asus motherboards are ok if you're doing everyday tasks. As soon as you want to do something unusual (lots of different cards, virtualisation, the more obscure BIOS/chipset features) - forget about it, they don't want to know. They only support Windows, so even there is a feature advertised as supported, and handled by the hardware, if there's no test case in Windows they will not fix it.

My last two motherboards have been Intel (S3200SHLC and D975XBX2). You suffer from a lack of upgrade ability, and sometimes the boards have some odd features, but they do work.

My next motherboard is likely to be a workstation one - so Supermicro, or Intel.

Of course, for the majority of users, all they need is to support a fast graphics card and a processor. Everything else is onboard. It just rankles that Asus claim to support all the standards, and then can't be arsed when it turns out it involves them having to make an effort.

I can see how support for obscure situations on a non-Windows OS could be an issue sometimes. A couple years ago I ran into an obscure issue related to CPU throttling with multi-core K8 CPUs on linux, where the problem turned out to be that a huge number of motherboard BIOSes didn't correctly implement some piece of required coding. The linux devs insisted that since it was truly a BIOS defect, they had no interest in coding around the problem on their end. I don't believe it was a problem in the Windows world.
I was grateful to realize I had a Tyan server board, and a simple BIOS update fixed the problem perfectly. Not so much luck for many people, who had never seen a BIOS for their boards that ever addressed the problem. Not sure where Asus stacked up in that.

FOSS devs can sometimes be a pain. Software is meant to just work... When it fails it doesn't matter who did not do things right, the fact is that there is an issue. This is one of the times where a company that needs things to work (like MS) can be a blessing.

alexanrs wrote:

FOSS devs can sometimes be a pain. Software is meant to just work... When it fails it doesn't matter who did not do things right, the fact is that there is an issue. This is one of the times where a company that needs things to work (like MS) can be a blessing.

Sure, but in some cases (not as many as you'd expect, as a lot of Linux code is written by companies and other paid coders) people are doing this for free. Their code *is* working - it's the hardware that's wrong. They didn't do this to handle all the associated crap, otherwise they'd expect money for it.

Of course in other cases, it's pigheadedness - the coder would feasibly implement workarounds, but won't. Microsoft does not necessarily have a lot of leverage on hardware manufacturers, there are many hackish workarounds in various OS, and this includes Windows.

Did not know about Linux. I really don't know if the most recent Debian will run on a Dual Slot1.

I haven't attempted a recent build of linux on a pentium iii yet, but I think once you get past the physical address extension issue with older system, the install and usage should be smooth. Or I could be mixing that up with K6-III builds, if so just disregard 😀

blank001 wrote:

I haven't attempted a recent build of linux on a pentium iii yet, but I think once you get past the physical address extension issue with older system, the install and usage should be smooth. Or I could be mixing that up with K6-III builds, if so just disregard 😀

Well...
I have tried the newest ubuntu on a duron laptop from around 2004/06.
That simply turned out horrible, as some CPU extensions/technology/something, was not present.
Ubuntu server worked well though. So the newest Linux on p-III?
Think I can forget it. On the other hand. This P-III dual CPU 440bx is not going to run Linux at all.

It should definitely work afaik they only dropped support for 486ers in the linux kernel. try a different distribution apart from debian, ubuntu etc.

Arctic wrote:

It should definitely work afaik they only dropped support for 486ers in the linux kernel. try a different distribution apart from debian, ubuntu etc.

Does not matter. I used it as my personal file server for a couple of days.
Then shut it down and threw it back in the closet.
Not really any usefull at all, that old laptop. It has no wireless and I do
not have space or desire for 10 meters of Ethernet cable across the house.

Naa...
To get back to that P2B-DS. It's for Windows98/2000 that I am going to use it for.
Not Linux at all. Getting a Raspberry PI 2 this year. That's my Linux-Box to be.

meljor wrote:

I have some dual boards, but not that one. (do have compaq dual slot1 450, asus dual 370 1ghz, asus dual athlon xp 2400+ and ty […]
Show full quote

I have some dual boards, but not that one. (do have compaq dual slot1 450, asus dual 370 1ghz, asus dual athlon xp 2400+ and tyan dual tualatin p3-1400)

They are fun to play with but i can't seem to find a really good retro use for them. Single seems to be just a little faster and old games don't use dual anyway.
I also really like 98se better and for xp there is no excuse (for me) not to just take a much faster dualcore cpu.

So, fun stuff, but for me not very useful.

This was my experience too. I had a P2B-D v1.06 with dual 800MHz Coppermines, and I couldn't really find a use for dual procs (I already have a P4 Northwood machine for XP stuff). I could overclock my 800MHz Coppermine on an MSI 6163-Pro further than the ASUS board, so I switched back and sold off the P2B-D.

dexter311 wrote:

This was my experience too. I had a P2B-D v1.06 with dual 800MHz Coppermines, and I couldn't really find a use for dual procs (I already have a P4 Northwood machine for XP stuff). I could overclock my 800MHz Coppermine on an MSI 6163-Pro further than the ASUS board, so I switched back and sold off the P2B-D.

It has 2x550mhz P-III's and comes with two stick's of memory, wich the seller can not remember the size of.
So I can't wait to test the following Operating Systems out on the board that I am getting.

BeOS, Win2000, Win-NT and perhaps Os2 if it has dual cpu support. (have to check first)

brostenen wrote:

It has 2x550mhz P-III's and comes with two stick's of memory, wich the seller can not remember the size of.
So I can't wait to test the following Operating Systems out on the board that I am getting.

BeOS, Win2000, Win-NT and perhaps Os2 if it has dual cpu support. (have to check first)

OS/2 does have dual CPU support, but only in the server versions until eComstation came along. It's probably not economic to just play around with, unless you can find Warp Server Advanced SMP very cheap on ebay (the prior SMP version was OS/2 2.11 SMP, which won't run the latest OS/2 software).

Probably fairly pointless in any case - a single pentium III will be more than fast enough to do most things you want. You're unlikely to want to run Truespectra Photo Graphics in SMP, when you can run Photoshop on a modern machine.