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 Do you want to signoff PCBUILD or just change to Digest mode - visit our web site: http://nospin.com/pc/pcbuild.html