On 28 Sep 99, at 17:07, Roberto Safora wrote:

> When dealing with dual PII motherboards:

> 1- Any restriction other than the speed, to select the cpus? I
> mean if they have to be identical, or made specially to work
> together.

  Traditionally, Intel's recommendation has been that paired CPUs be
within a single "stepping" of each other -- and new steppings could
be implemented as little as six weeks apart.
  That said, I've heard of people successfully running dual boards
with say a P2 in one slot and a Celeron (with the SMP unblocked...)
in the other successfully.
  THAT said, I'd recommend against trying to pair a P3, with its
additional instructions, with a P2 or Celeron.

  There is a single set of FSB and multiplier (combine to give speed)
settings on the board which apply to both CPUs.  [Celerons will
ignore the board multiplier setting, but I don't think I'd bother
trying to run the CPUs at different speeds -- that's asking for
trouble.]

> 2- If I decide to use just one cpu, must the other slot be full
> with a cpu simulator(or terminator or whatever it is named)¿?

  No.  Some board manufacturers include one, and it *may* improve
system stability and reduce RF noise/interference.


  At the time that we initially built our network, we could find DIMM
slots on dual-CPU boards but not on single-CPU boards.  [We wanted
SCSI built in, which restricted our choices a bit.]  We found that we
could deploy a dual-CPU board with a single CPU, populated with 256MB
RAM, for about $100 less than if we used a single-CPU board.  So we
used a fair number of them.

  If you want to go dual but can only afford one CPU for now, I'd
plan to sell the original CPU and buy a matched pair rather than just
try to add the second CPU later.  You'll pay a bit more, but your
odds of a stable working system should be improved.  [In our case, we
could buy a new matched pair for server #1, and the old CPU was a
match for the CPU in server #2, so this strategy can work even better
with multiple machines....]

David G

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