Dual pentium processor motherboard?

[LeeV]

Hello All,

There is a new beast in my collection, it is an Intergraph TD-10. This computer has dual socket5 pentiums, and uses on board SCSI controller, and has 4 drives plus SCSI CD Rom. I'm still tracking down all the documentation for it now. My question is, what flavor of windows should I be using for this kind of thing? It was origianaly a Win NT machine, and much to my dismay, someone has installed Win 98. Am I correct in thinking I heard somewhere that only NT and 2000 support the dual processor feature?

I know that this thing is a relic, but I learn alot fom these older machines, and would enjoy the challenge of making it work at least as well as it did when it was first built. I have two computers networked with a 3Com hub, both P133's, could I add this machine to the network as a file server/database? I would rather turn it into a challenge than a pile of shelved parts.

Lee

[Paleo Pete]

NT server would be perfect for a dual CPU machine. Socket 5 means it's an older one, but it should do quite well. I've seen a dual P-233 server that off-the-shelf 333's could barely match. Win98 will work, but not all that well, 98 wasn't really designed to handle dual CPU's.

To run it as a server, make sure you have plenty memory in it, 96-128MB should be sufficient, and plenty hard drive space, which it sounds like it should have if those four drives are at least 4GB each. NT handles dual CPU's very well, and should be stable as they get.

Just so you don't misunderstand it, dual CPU's don't make a faster machine, they just allow more to happen at once, by sharing the load between the two. It will have a minor performance edge over a single CPU machine, but nothing to write home about. When CPU usege jumps to a certain point part of the load is sent to the other CPU, so generally the overall load hovers about 35-50%, fluctuating between the two, at least that's what Norton's System Information gauges say.

I'd say set that bad boy up with NT, don't try to overclock it, and you should have a good server. If you decide to upgrade to faster CPU's they have to be the same. And make sure you have good quality fans in it, including a secondary case fan.

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[Randy_tx]

The only operating systems that have the ability to take full advantage of Dual processors include Os2, NT and I think Linux. The Win 95 kernel (including win98) is not a true Multitasking/Multithreading OS as we all know and that is what's required to access both processors simultaneously.

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"As hard as a rock & dumb as a brick"...Windows CEMeNT