On 7 Apr 99, at 8:57, Vincent Lim (Lim Wei Siong Vincent) wrote:

> I hope the gonards of the newsgroup can help me with this problem.

  Gonards?  Curmudgeons, perhaps, but what's a gonard?  [I know, it's
off-topic -- mail me privately.]

> I have a machine which is running Pentium 166 on a cirra 1997 Soyo HX
> mobo with 32 EDO RAM.
> I happened to have another Pentium 166 CPU.
> I want to throw away my existing motherboard and get a new mobo which
> will support Ultra DMA, faster RAM and if possible, twin CPU.
> Can someone please recommend me a mobo which allows me to do that?

  Dual Socket 7 boards have existed, but they were never very common,
and I don't think there have been any new ones announced since the
Pentium Pro (Socket 8) came out a few years back.  As I recall, Tyan
was the company best known for dual-S7 boards; they might have specs on
their web site even if they're no longer made.

  Intel recommends that CPUs to be paired should be no more than a
single revision apart.  The 166 MHz Pentiums were on the market for
quite a while, and so the chips you have may or may not be close enough
to work together.  [They're old enough that odds of finding a matched
pair to swap them for are poor.]

  Note also that dual CPUs won't have any effect unless you run an OS
that can take advantage of them.  NT 4 can.  Win 3.x and 9x can't.  I
think most Unices, including Linux, can.  I don't know about support
under OS/2 or BeOS.  [Well, I know that BeOS is supposed to do it, but
I'm not certain what is the state of their x86 implementation.]

  If you need the horsepower for a server, you'd be better to go to one
of the dual PII boards.  The other main use for a dual-CPU machine is
as an NT WS developer machine for multithreaded applications.  Thread
synchronization errors tend to show up much faster with real
multiprocessing rather than just pre-emptive multitasking, so this is a
useful test platform (but again, requires an OS that can handle it).


David G

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