Dual P3's

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Brad4321

Gawd
Joined
Feb 1, 2003
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553
I did some dumpster diving and found a complete computer. Upon testing and disassembling, it has a dead motherboard. Everything else appears to be in good shape, for digging it out of a dumpster, that is.

Upon doing some searches, I found that you can run P3's as a dually, which was unknown to me. Seeing how cheap these processors and so forth are now, this has got me more interested than keeping it a single.

Are P3's SMP aware from the factory, or do you have to mod them? It is a 933/133FSB socket 370.

The cheapest dual 370 motherboard I have found on pricewatch is $97, which is completely outrageous. Before I look in the FS/FT forum, am I missing something obvious why these boards are still so high in price?
 
All P3s are dual capable out of the box. You're supposed to match steppings, but it's not required for a hobbist system. The reason the boards are still so expensive is that they are fairly rare and a geek commodity, and are used for replacements for business systems. Some businesses require a direct one to one replacement, which means if a Daul-P3 board fails, they have to get another of the same model. Low supply, high demand.
 
Not to mention they are still valueable to the hoobyist community. Most though boards can be resurrected into usefulness with linux or a bsd variant and make fine programming stations or servers.
 
Most though boards can be resurrected into usefulness with linux or a bsd variant and make fine programming stations or servers.
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That was my plan ;).

The dually idea may be out of the question unless I can find it for cheaper.
 
tom61 said:
All P3s are dual capable out of the box. You're supposed to match steppings, but it's not required for a hobbist system. The reason the boards are still so expensive is that they are fairly rare and a geek commodity, and are used for replacements for business systems. Some businesses require a direct one to one replacement, which means if a Daul-P3 board fails, they have to get another of the same model. Low supply, high demand.
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no, most pIII's are dual cap. out of box. any tualatin core chips that do not have 512 cache are not, celeron and pIII alike.

for a dual p3 board, id look at 2cpu forums, you should be able to pick up an abit Vp6 or something like that for cheap. if you are thinking about weather to do it or not, do it! i love my dual pIII system :D
 
AMDXPCottonFire22 said:
Wouldnt a P4 with HT do better? :rolleyes:
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whats your point? my dual system was a hell of alot more fun to build and mess with than a p4, not to mention it runs cooler, quieter, and is very fast. typically, a 1.75ghz p3-s like i have will match ~a 2.4ghz or so p4, and ive got two of them in SMP. id take this system any day over a HT p4

but hey, thanks for crapping!:)
 
besides, the idea is to use his old hardware, not buy totally new stuff.
 
Side note even. If you can find a VP6 with bad caps, Abit will replace them. Nearly all the boards I saw that failed had bad caps. You could probably pick one up for cheap and get it repaired.
 
Brad4321 said:
The cheapest dual 370 motherboard I have found on pricewatch is $97, which is completely outrageous. Before I look in the FS/FT forum, am I missing something obvious why these boards are still so high in price?
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They have them; you don't. The supply is dwindling; the hobbyist demand is still there. Someone will pay that $97...I paid $99 for my Tyan Tiger LE a few years ago.

Anyway, about stepping matching...Check Intel's docs. Intel provides great documentation for their CPUs and in the vast majority of cases you do not have to match steppings for CPUs. Intel's documentation will let you know what steppings will work in a supported SMP setup and what won't...Since they made the CPUs you should probably listen to them.

lithium726 is spot-on; not all PIII-core CPUs are SMP-capable.
 
lithium... looked at your sig.... Ive got one of those MSIs with dual P3 1000EBs running 1.1 and a gig of DDR... good enough to play all the way through halflife2 (only a couple abysmally busy spots getting attacked by a hundred drones or something, but I muddled through) heh... basicly same video card too.... LOL tho I've got the "advantage" version so I have the cheap ass TSOP ram that don't OC for crap 478/253

A MSI Pro266TD is an excellent board

ABIT VP6 far from feature rich and no DDR is also a very nice board to dual P3 on.

I've been using one of each for the last 3 years.

minor personal opinion about p3s..... when someone says S370 P3 around me I think coppermine's. Tualatins ehh... would have been a really good thing, but it was too little too late with too little compatability. With everyone sacraficing their pipelines just to have higher MHz and GHz the P4 was the deathknell for the P3.

any coppermine will run on any S370 board

a tualatin (has the heat spreader) will only work on a tualatin board

_cannot_ dual a 256K cache Taulatin (that I know of). They MUST BE 512K Cache.

coppermines if you can find them cheap.....

1.4 GHz 512K Cache Tualatins $200 or more per processor.

if its just for fun and you want to be cheap.... go coppermines.....otherwise save your dough for a P4... building a tualatin machine today or upgrading to tualatin just is not enough bang for the buck today IMHO
 
i got my 1.4's for 65 a peice, you just gotta wait for the right deal. on that same note, i got the MSI board for 98 shipped just a little while ago. the system has only cost me 250 bucks(out of my pocket, i had the other stuff lying around), and its damn fast.. you say they could have been a really good thing, but have you ever *used* a 1.75ghz (im gonna take it higher when my board gets back from RMA, there is a clockgen version for it that will let me go higher than 166fsb) pIII-s? its very fast, especially for its age... even just one chip

also, there are coppermines with the heatspreader, FC-PGA2 *only* refers to the heatspreader, not the pin layout. although electronically different, intel only did this becuase current chipsets could not support the low voltage of the tualatin. the 1.13ghz coppermines have heatspreaders, and they show up on ebay every once in a while, though very, very rare

oh, and that is just my most liked system, my gaming system is a 2.4ghz athlon XP with a gig of TCCD and a 6800GT.

oh, and i didnt it for bang for buck, it was just something fun that ive always wanted to have :D
 
maybe I should have said new 1.4s are $200....

lithium... the system I was talking about was my gaming rig. I built it 4 years ago as the biggest most bad ass thing I could afford, put in the MSI when mother nature took one of my beloved VP6s from me (little lightning damage) and plunked in a new video card every so often. 4 years is a long lifetime for a gaming rig, it wasn't until Halflife2 that there was a game that I wanted to play but couldn't get the performance that I felt I wanted. I'm upgrading as soon as the taxman pays me. Abandoning SMP as my gaming platform for now, or at least until some dual cores start rolling.

never got a p3 running more than 1150.... tho it put a huge grin on my face when I stomped the snot out of a friend who thought his new P4 1.6 was the shit.

I'm keeping my dualies in the paddoc not the pasture...... tho I think I'll finally retire my ASUS P2B (BX chipset) running a celery2 600 @900. Trickledown upgrades in my home.... the warden (spoken wife) will get a dually to replace her machine.
 
Wouldnt a P4 with HT do better?
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When I find a P4 with HT in a dumpster I will work on that.

Side note even. If you can find a VP6 with bad caps, Abit will replace them. Nearly all the boards I saw that failed had bad caps. You could probably pick one up for cheap and get it repaired.
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I have e-mailed someone with a vp6 earlier today. In a way, that is a good thing to know.

They have them; you don't. The supply is dwindling; the hobbyist demand is still there. Someone will pay that $97...I paid $99 for my Tyan Tiger LE a few years ago.
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I see your supply/demand concept, but when I can buy a brand new board supporting brand new processors for less than that price, it dives into the realm of insanity. I love playing with old systems (mostly amd, however), but when the cost gets up that high, it just isn't worth that.

Try ebay. I picked up a decent MSI dual 370 mobo for $15.
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Ebay was the second place I looked. It seems that you just got lucky. I can find off brand singles for $10, but the duallies are still going 5x that.
 
The_Mage18 said:
Side note even. If you can find a VP6 with bad caps, Abit will replace them. Nearly all the boards I saw that failed had bad caps. You could probably pick one up for cheap and get it repaired.
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Get a 3rd party to do it, ABIT will replace the shitty caps with more of the same shitty caps, that will let you run for a limited time until they puke out again...

See here:

http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?p=1027188347#post1027188347

If the board found in the dumpster needs recapping, go to badcaps.net they can help.

MD
 
Brad4321 ... not sure if the system came with memory and/or what type of memory you have on hand ... if you've got some PC133 registered ecc sticks and want to put together a server ... take a look on eBay for a Tyan Thunder 2510 .. it comes in 3 flavors (scsi/ide, ide/ide raid, or ide) ... nice stable server board that will support the 933s.
 
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