Quote:
Originally posted by quiet mike
I have a question. If I buy a dual processor board, can use only one processor until I get money for a second one? THe Athlon MP combination looks very tasty, so I'm wondering if I can get the board, and one chip now, and later a second one.
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It's a question I've been pondering myself (it may well depend on the mobo itself) - seeing as if I went the whole hog and bought two Ath XP's (ugh... I hate those two letters) I'd be forking out nearly £600 just for my processors. 2 1GHz Athlons will set me back £140 and still give me more processing power than almost every program (apart from PhotoShop and 3DS Max) knows what to do with.
If I find an answer before you do, I'll post it here.
Besides, if you do fancy the dual processor idea you can always buy two cheap processors and then upgrade later. Main thing to remember is that most software (for windows at least) doesn't support dual processing, so for most applications you'll have a whole processor lying useless. However, high end applications (such as photoshop, 3D progs, music/video compression encoders and the like) almost always have MPS support, as well as special routines to take full advantage of parallel processing abilities, so if you do alot of high powered CPU work then a dual processor is great.
I'm pretty certain that at least Win2K has MPS support built in too. Linux has it built in and it makes (re)compiling your source code damned fast.
If you just play games however (which, contrary to popular opinion, aren't that heavy on CPU's anymore), the you're probably better off getting the fastest CPU you can find, which will hopefully last you a good while. Remember that if you buy a top of the range processor now, there's no way you'll be able to upgrade it without changing your mobo, and essentially your whole computer, with it.
Remember though that increases in processor speed have leapt far ahead of the demands of software, and short of rendering 3D images and other number crunching, most CPU cycles are never used - running Win2K along with winamp playing (as well as firewall, antivirus, chat and all the rest of it) uses a grand total of 2-5% of my processor (a lowly P3 1GHz) - I had to fight to get it there though, . The only progs I've got that can max it out for more than a second at a time are photoshop (encoding multiple 15 MB jpeg's and png's) and 3DS Max doing... well, anything really.
As far as I'm concerned, processing power is overrated. Sure,
I have uses for it, but by and large the public don't. Yet they are duped into the megahertz myth so that M$ can produce even more bloated software and the computer companies make more money/force you to upgrade more. Bah.[/rant]
Though if you're going to do something seful with your spare cycles I won't mind so much...
