Thinking of upgrading to Athlon MP... am insane?

Captain Obvious warns about directly comparing a 1 CPU system to a 2!
Unless you have programs designed to run on dual processors you will only get the speed of 1 CPU, But you can run 2 tasks at once!

Captain Obvious recommends a 1 CPU system. Dual only if you have the applications to go with it!

<b><font color=red>Captain Obvious To The Rescue!!!</font color=red></b>

Thank you Captain!

Yes i should clarify.. i do indeed run programs that would benefit from dual cpus... (maya, after effects, premiere, photoshop)

Captain Obvious says then its obvious that you would benefit from a dual CPU system.

Captain Obvious admits his knowledge of Dual CPU systems is limited, so he directs you to goto <A HREF="http://www.2cpu.com" target="_new">http://www.2cpu.com&lt;/A>


<b><font color=red>Captain Obvious To The Rescue!!!</font color=red></b>

thanks!

I have a Dual Athlon MP 2400+. Depending on how you feel about it, you could try and get old OEM Athlon XPs and mod them to work as MPs, however I decided to not go down this route and payed the extra for MPs. 2Gb of registered RAM should work fine on an MPX board. I think ASUS stopped producing theirs, I have the MSI board and that is pretty popular over at <A HREF="http://www.2cpu.com" target="_new">2cpu</A>. Alternatives would be the Gigabyte or Iwill offerings. I wouldn't go higher than 2400+ simply becuase the increased performance doesn't match the cost and you can easily overclock to 2600+ anyway. Barton doesn't make much difference because the old MPX chipset is stuck with a 266MHz FSB.

The question for you is, how much do you need the 3D-rendering workstation? Is it part of your buisness or just a hobby, i.e., is decreased performance going to cost you time and money? If not, then the only reason for getting dualie is just for the hell of it, which ain't a bad reason - you just have to put up with people telling you you're nuts. Personally I've decided to hold all upgrades until the PCI-Express / Lindenhurst boards are available by which time processors should be down to the 90nm manufacturing process that should also make them cheaper. But that's likely to be H2 2004., i.e., not soon. Intel's next round of price cuts are expected on 10/26 when the P4 2.6 GHz should drop by about $30. I doubt the lower end Xeons will budge.

<A HREF="http://www.anandtech.com/myanandtech.html?member=114979" target="_new">My PCs</A> :cool: