Dual CPUs for games?

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TheMesserschmidt1

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Dec 12, 2012
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Hello World.

I'm currently toying with the thought about building an extremely powerful rig with a motherboard that got two CPU-sockets.
I know these motherboards were designed for servers back in the early days, but is it possible for PC games to actually be compatible with dual CPUs?
Can you, for instance, play Fallout 4 maxed out and spread the usage out on two CPUs?

I'd appreciate it if some of you guys, who have some actual experience with this kind of thing, shared some of that experience.
And that no theories came to life :)
 
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ComputerSecurityGuy

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It is possible. The OS and applications will just view the second CPU as more cores. However this really isn't optimal for gaming. For video editing somewhat, but gaming is still limited to a few threads and the relatively slow bus between proccessors will not help either. So not optimal or as good as a single CPU with more cores. However for editing and web servers, dual sockets become more useful, especially the latter.
 
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TheMesserschmidt1

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Thanks for your answers.

But, does that mean you won't even be able to assign applications to CPU1 or CPU2? For example, select CPU1 to run Skype, Steam etc. and CPU2 to run the major applications like games?
 
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tsnor

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LOL. Every modern intel and AMD processor gives multiple cores. Most people's biggest problem with pentium anniversary edition is that it have only 2 cores. (i3 processor also have 2 cores but use SMT to appear to have 4 cores). The coding APIs used by games are the same for single and dual socket MBs. Other than performance games don't care.

YES you can game on a dual socket x86 server motherboard. People use server chips to game on all the time. w/ECC memory, SAS drives, raid adapters and all the rest of the infrastructure you pick up with a server. Here's one from a while ago http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/mainboards/display/20100106094116_EVGA_Preps_Dual_Socket_Mainboard_for_Gaming_Systems.html Here's another board https://www.asus.com/us/Motherboards/Z9PED8_WS/ claiming Both SLI™ and CrossfireX™ architectures .... Whether for professional graphics work, heavy duty multimedia or dedicated gaming, more than ample graphics power can be applied..."

But a dual socket MB is probably not the best choice. Keeping cache in sync between the two sockets hurts performance for workloads that share data between threads alot, and I'd guess most games work that way. I'd guess a modern single socket MB would perform much better than a dual socket MB for almost all games.
 
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tsnor

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Jack, can you say why?

Motherboard makers think you can use two sockets for the same game, see the links I gave above.

Understand that the two processor sockets see a unified view of memory and act (except for performance) exactly as multiple cores in the same processor socket.

The much respected gaming processor, the intel q6600, (I still have one) was actually two dual core chips, not a single processor chip. Multiple cores in multiple chips in multiple sockets on the MB are very much like the two processor chips, each with two cores, that combined to form the quad core q6600.


 
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Tolich

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YES it's possible to play all modern games with dual Intel Xeon processors. And you will get the additional performance BUT ONLY if the game can utilize the second processor. For sample - X-PLANE can do it. But for most of a games you will not get any additional performance (usually games can't "see" more then for cores). And in this case you have to think about the speed of the processors (basically - you have to choose as fast (in MHz) Xeon from E5 v3 generation (2643 or 2637 for sample) as possible). And for the gaming it's better to choose Asus MB with crossfire and SLI support, like Z10PE-D8 WS (D16 WS but D8 supports 4-way SLI and etc.).

P.S. For 4K Fallout 4 i7 6700K + 2xRadeon Fury X or 2x980Ti - more than enough and any way you will not get a really nice graphics because Fallout 4 has a very simple graphics.
 
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