quoting D. R. Evans; Tuesday 05 August 2003 02:08 pm: > Does anyone have any wisdom they would care to share in regards to running > Mandrake on a dual processor box? > > I am thinking in particular of dual-Athlon boxes, and in particular > particular (!) of buying a Cybertron dual-Athlon box, and would like to > know if this would be a stupid thing to do. > > Doc Evans
"What's up Doc"; Sorry, I just couldn't resist that. I just assembled a dual Athlon box for a friend last week, and as far as I can tell the only difference between that and the single CPU boxes I usually deal with is a matter of degree. It seems to me that dual processors are capable of running more simultaneous processor intensive applications without errors. Compiling kernels/software, serving a LAN and pretending to be a workstation at the same time, "advanced" multi-media tasks, or whatever other applications are built/optimized to actually take advantage of dual processors. As far as "day to day use" differences you'd probably find that, for most people, a single extremely fast processor, and as much *low* memory as possible will run most things just as quickly. Anything beyond 1 GB of RAM seems to be slower, plus most of the motherboards available require ECC registered memory (more expensive and even slower) for anything above 1.5 GB. Specs for the system I did last week; (dual boot with Windows XP Pro, which he hasn't installed yet) Asus A7M266-D 2X Athlon MP 2000+ 1 GB (2x512 MB) Crucial PC-2700 DDR 80 GB Maxtor GForce 4 (MSI) 440 MX 64 MB video Enermax 450 Watt PS MSI 52x24x52 CD-RW All GNU/Linux partitions excepting /boot are XFS. There was no trouble with the Mandrake 9.1 Bamboo install, or any configuration of the system. To say the install was rather quick (compared to his PIII 500 system) may be a bit of an understatement. The biggest (only) problem was convincing the LinkSys router he uses to assign an IP address. NVidia's installer ran error free, both with the installed kernel (.13mdk enterprise) and the upgrade (.25mdk enterprise). Unless you are doing a lot more than just desktop usage you'd probably be happier and save a few bucks with an Athlon XP 3000+. Or a P4 3.2 (:-P). I tried to talk my friend out of the dual CPU system for a couple of weeks before I finally caved and ordered the components. Should have spared myself the bother since it didn't work. Seems he wanted bragging rights in his 'clique'. :-) I'll probably go the dual CPU route too when I build my next box. RSN that is. I can't seem to convince myself it's a waste either. <g> Charlie -- Edmonton,AB,Canada Registered user 244963 at http://counter.li.org Mandrake 9.1 Bamboo (cooked) 14:32:50 up 5 days, 3:04, 1 user, load average: 0.19, 0.19, 0.11 Do not underestimate the value of print statements for debugging.
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