Dual Pentium II Setup @ 515 MHz!

Name: Dual Pentium II Setup @ 515 MHz!
Brand: Dual

by HH Editor — Friday, December 14, 2001, 11:00 PM EDT

Dual Pentium II Setup @ 515 MHz.! - Page 1

Dual Pentium II Setup @ 515 MHz.!

So you're thinking to yourself, "self" you say... "why would Davo bother with a Dual Pentium II rig"? Well, besides feeding my ego saying it can be done, SMP (Symmetric Multi-Processing) is the wave of the future!

Sun, Alpha, SGI and many other high end platforms have been doing this for years with multithreaded operating systems. With the advent of Windows 2000 (word is it will be released this year) the "WIntel" platform will be moving this way as well!

Already we have heard of Quake 3 Arena and Falcon 4 support for SMP. So I ask you, why play the MHz. game when you can just add another processor and increase your processing power exponentially? OK, so let's back off on the hype for a minute. We aren't quite there yet.

Win2000 isn't out yet and applications and games that support SMP are just now being announced for release later this year. At this point it really doesn't make sense for the average user. Only people who are running high end NT Servers and Linux Servers need apply for this kind of set up. However, at some point this technology will absolutely be a viable option for the Home/Office User. We at Hot Hardware thought you would like a glimpse of the future! Here are my findings.

First things first. Here's how I set this speedster up...

Our Test System

Full Tower ATX Case w/ 300W PS, Dual Pentium 2 -333s Overclocked to 515 each, Shuttle HOT-649A Dual Processor Motherboard, 128 MB of PC100 CAS2 RAM, IBM Deskstar 10GXP 10GB 7200 RPM EIDE UDMA Hard Drive, IBM 4.5GB DDRS34560D 7200 RPM Ultra SCSI 2 Drive, Voodoo 3 3000 AGP w/ 16MB SDRAM, Monster Sound MX300 PCI Audio Card, Toshiba SDM1202 3rd. Gen. 4.8X DVD/32X CDROM, Windows NT Workstation 4 w/ S.P. 4

I hand selected the CPUs for this test and the lot and date codes are as follows.

P2-333 Malay SL2WY - 98371181 and P2-333 Ireland SL2TV Y8410554

If you haven't been over to our affiliate site, Overclockers.com, you are missing out! Joe C. has a great resource over there with his CPU database and we use it religiously here at Hot Hardware. You also have to have serious cooling with dual overclocked CPUs sitting side by side. They really warm each other up in their cozy little nest. This co-habitation is fun for humans but deadly for CPUs! :-)

Now, just to prove I really pulled this off. For any skeptics out there, here's a screen shot of my BIOS at boot...

OK so it isn't pretty but you can see that it says 2 Processors and the clocks are being reported as 522, which actually was more accurately 515 MHz. each.

There aren't many good benchmark applications for WinNT or games for that matter. We tried desperately to get Falcon 4 to work but to no avail. If anyone has any hints on this, drop me a line! You are supposed to be able to run Falcon 4 under NT and it is multithreaded to boot!

As a result, we decide to go with the industry standard Winbench 99 suite of benchmarks. Under NT these tests use both processors and also have special dual processor tests. You'll like the results we got!

ZD Winbench 99 Results
Higher Scores are better...	*Dual P2-333s OC'ed To 515!*
*WinBench 99/Business Disk WinMark 99 (Thousand Bytes/Sec)*	3650
*WinBench 99/Business Graphics WinMark 99*	211
*WinBench 99/CPUmark32*	1350
*WinBench 99/Disk Playback/Bus:Overall (Thousand Bytes/Sec)*	2650
*WinBench 99/Disk Playback/HE:AVS/Express 3.4 (Thousand Bytes/Sec)*	9280
*WinBench 99/Disk Playback/HE:FrontPage 98 (Thousand Bytes/Sec)*	35700
*WinBench 99/Disk Playback/HE:MicroStation SE (Thousand Bytes/Sec)*	12000
*WinBench 99/Disk Playback/HE:Overall (Thousand Bytes/Sec)*	8730
*WinBench 99/Disk Playback/HE:Photoshop 4.0 (Thousand Bytes/Sec)*	4930
*WinBench 99/Disk Playback/HE:Premiere 4.2 (Thousand Bytes/Sec)*	6800
*WinBench 99/Disk Playback/HE:Sound Forge 4.0 (Thousand Bytes/Sec)*	8390
*WinBench 99/Disk Playback/HE:Visual C++ 5.0 (Thousand Bytes/Sec)*	8790
*WinBench 99/FPU WinMark*	2660
*WinBench 99/GDI Playback/HE/AVS/Express 3.4*	83.4
*WinBench 99/GDI Playback/HE/FrontPage 98*	133
*WinBench 99/GDI Playback/HE/MicroStation SE*	8.1
*WinBench 99/GDI Playback/HE/MicroStation SE MP*	3.33
*WinBench 99/GDI Playback/HE/Photoshop 4.0*	60.9
*WinBench 99/GDI Playback/HE/Photoshop 4.0 MP*	51.9
*WinBench 99/GDI Playback/HE/Premiere 4.2*	67.1
*WinBench 99/GDI Playback/HE/Sound Forge 4.0*	118
*WinBench 99/GDI Playback/HE/Visual C++ 5.0*	235
*WinBench 99/GDI Playback/HE/Visual C++ 5.0 MP*	444
*WinBench 99/High-End Disk WinMark 99 (Thousand Bytes/Sec)*	8730
*WinBench 99/High-End Graphics WinMark 99*	374
*Winstone 99/Business Winstone 99:Winstone 99 scores (Winstone units)*	28.9
*Winstone 99/Dual-Processor Inspection Tests:Winstone 99 scores (Winstone units)*	3.25
*Winstone 99/High-End/MicroStation SE MP:Winstone 99 scores (Winstone units)*	2.5
*Winstone 99/High-End/Photoshop 4.0 MP:Winstone 99 scores (Winstone units)*	3.04
*Winstone 99/High-End/Visual C++ 5.0 MP:Winstone 99 scores (Winstone units)*	5.15
*Basic Info/Date Time*	4/19/99 9:47
*Basic Info/Benchmark Name*	WinBench 99
*Basic Info/Description*	P2-333 OC'ed To 515
*Basic Info/Tester Name*	Dave
*System Info/CPU Active Processors*	2
*System Info/CPU Clock Speed*	517
*System Info/CPU Clock Speed (Unrounded)*	514921299
*System Info/CPU Family*	6
*System Info/CPU Features*	0x0183FBFF
*System Info/CPU Floating Point*	Yes
*System Info/CPU L1 Cache (KB)*	32
*System Info/CPU L2 Cache (KB)*	512
*System Info/CPU Model*	5
*System Info/CPU Name*	Intel Pentium(R) II or Intel Pentium(R) II Xeon(TM) processor
*System Info/CPU Stepping*	2

For reference, here is what the sample ZD Winstone machine tested in the ZD reference charts. It was a Dell Optiplex w/ 1 - 400MHz processor under NT4.

ZD Winbench 99 Results	Dell OptiPlex GX1 - 128mb Ram
*Winstone 99/Business Winstone 99:Winstone 99 scores (Winstone units)*	27.4
*Winstone 99/Dual-Processor Inspection Tests:Winstone 99 scores (Winstone units)*	2.52
*Winstone 99/High-End/MicroStation SE MP:Winstone 99 scores (Winstone units)*	2.39
*Winstone 99/High-End/Photoshop 4.0 MP:Winstone 99 scores (Winstone units)*	1.97
*Winstone 99/High-End/Visual C++ 5.0 MP:Winstone 99 scores (Winstone units)*	3.75

Uh... yeah, you could say we smoked it! What did you expect? These are very impressive numbers over all. Will this help you Quake2 frame rates? No, but when Quake3 comes along, if you have NT or Win2000 it will!

The future looks bright folks! SMP for the home user is coming of age!

-Dave