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Well,
we?ve been talking about mounting all these extras
in your case but we haven?t actually mentioned
what kind of case to put them in!
Do yourself a favor and take our advice on
this one?you?re going to want to use a full
tower.
You?ll be doing yourself a disservice if
you use a cramped mid or mini tower.
Ok,
by now you've got your nice big case loaded with
fans and well ventilated. To further insure
cool, reliable operation of your hardware heat has
to be pulled away from each component. Using
high quality heatsinks and fans is by far the easiest
most popular way to do this.
There
are many more "exotic" methods available
today like refrigeration units, peltiers and water
cooling but we opted for the "ol standby",
a pair of Alpha PAL6035s. (Thanks again Outside
Loop!) When mounting the coolers, we'll be using
Artic Silver thermal epoxy. One of the most
important and also most overlooked steps when
mounting a heatsink is using a high quality
interface material. If you opt not to use a
good thermal interface material like thermal grease,
you are crippling the performance of your
coolers.
With all
of the extra calls being sent through the
Northbridge on a dual processor rig, taking extra
steps to cool it is also a good idea. The Abit
VP6 shipped with a small passive heatsink mounted on
the Northbridge. We'll be pulling that off in
favor of an active unit we recycled from an older 486
system...
We
removed the "stock" heatsink from the
VP6's Northbridge and cleaned it off thoroughly with
some alcohol. We then installed a piece of
thermal tape on the Northbridge and stuck our active
cooler to it...
That's
all there is to it. With this active cooler
installed, we're sure to have increased stability
and a better chance of hitting higher clockspeeds
should we decide to over-clock.
We've
taken some special considerations with our hardware
but with a dual-cpu rig, the software and OS used
are crucial. Windows 9x users need not apply
because Microsoft's "home" OS does not
offer support for multi-processors. As of
today Windows 2000 and Linux are the best choices of
multi-processor compatible OSes. We will
be using Windows 2000 on our rig.
Before
you install your OS, make a list of your peripherals
because there is still much work to be done.
Scour the net and be sure to download the most
recent drivers for your hardware that will be
operating with your new OS. We grabbed drivers
for our video card, sound card, NIC, modem, SCSI
card, printer, chipset, mouse and keyboard.
This is a tedious task but a much needed step. In
general you're overall performance an compatibility
will be much better if you use the newest drivers
designed for the OS.
It's also a good idea to make a list of your
favorite applications and check their websites for
any updates or patches that may be needed to use the
software with a different OS. Also keep in
mind that only multi-threaded applications can take
advantage of your second CPU. Not every piece
of software you run will benefit from the extra
horsepower.
That's
all we have for you today. Our goal was not to
go in-depth into setting up a dual-processor rig,
but rather just give a general outline of the steps
that should be taken. I had done most of
these things to prepare for our review and it never occurred
to me that this information could be useful to some
users. Be sure to check back here in
a few days. We'll be posting our full review
of the Abit VP6 using two un-locked 1GHz.
PIIIs! This rig is smokin'!
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