brostenen wrote on 2015-07-14, 20:30:So....
The board would be great for pre-2000 gaming and only be able to use one CPU?
Because of Windows98 not being able to use […]
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So....
The board would be great for pre-2000 gaming and only be able to use one CPU?
Because of Windows98 not being able to use dual CPU.
And low performance for post 2001 gaming and WinXP?
Put quite simply: this isn't (nor was it ever intended to be) a gaming board. It was intended for compute-heavy workstation loads of the kind people used So603/604 dual Netburst Xeon boards for. Just as with the Xeon, overall clock speed and FSB were kept lower than with single CPU, both to enhance stability and to keep power draw/thermals under control.
For its given purpose, this thing was a monster, utterly demolishing far higher-clocked Xeons in pretty much every application that did not support SSE2, and even if it did support SSE2, the difference was small and this platform was cheaper.
For gaming though... theoretically you can enable SMP on Q3A which might give a small boost vs single CPU. I don't know whether havli tested with SMP active or not, but even if he did not, it's not likely this board would beat a faster-clocked single AthlonXP. That said, the comparison with an nForce2-Ultra400 is unfair, as that's the fastest of all SoA platforms and was released two years later than the 760MPX. No surprise that dual channel DDR400 beat the hell out of single channel DDR266. A more fair comparison would be with the Via KT266A ,which was released around the same time as the 760MPX. But the MPX still lost, even with the same CPU:
As I explained above, the Tiger MPX loses in all the resolutions, but only notably in the 640×480 resolutions, where it is down by nearly 16%. However, taking into consideration most people play the games at 1024×768 or higher, the difference slips to about 11% in 32-bit color.
As with dual P3 systems, an AthlonMP is still much too slow to play any truly multithreaded games where you get a big boost from that second CPU. The second CPU certainly has added value, but not in gaming. In fact it's worse than with the P3 as there you can at least take two of the fastest CPUs and combine them with the fastest chipset (2x P3-1400S on i840) so at least you don't lose anything by going dual. Here you clearly do sacrifice single CPU performance.