Outpost Universe Forums
Off Topic => Computers & Programming General => Topic started by: CK9 on May 06, 2006, 02:53:50 AM
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http://www.tyan.com/products/html/thunderk8qsdpro.html (http://www.tyan.com/products/html/thunderk8qsdpro.html)
*drools*
I know it's a server board, but could you imagine the gaming posibilities?
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wouldnt the gmae have to be compiled to support multiple cpus?
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unless you are planning on playing the original doom it is not a good gaming board at all. best gfx card you could put was a pci one, as most good cards are agp or pci-e. and as moogle says, the game actually has to use multithreading to get any benifit from 4 cpus. not recompiled, rewrittien completely. you *might* be able to use a workstation class board in it, but those are expensive as hell, and not designed for gaming.
EDIT: yup, you are out cold when it comes to gfx rly.
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unless you are planning on playing the original doom it is not a good gaming board at all.
What's wrong with the original Doom? I'd spend most of my time playing that if I didn't have Outpost 2.
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meh, I'd order it customized to allow better CPU
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heh
i want !
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You would really want the Thunder K8QW which has PCi-e !
http://www.tyan.com/products/html/thunderk8qw.html (http://www.tyan.com/products/html/thunderk8qw.html)
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there, thats the right one (thumbsup) (thumbsup) (thumbsup) .
ck9: cpu doesnt help with graphics ... itld still suck no matter how good a cpu u got
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my dream mb, 2 x 128 bit processors <- they dont exist yet 4 gig or ram built onto the cpu, with todays technology the chips would be the size of a cdrom, no need for mechanical physical drives as there is 1 tb of static ram drive chips on the mb. fiber networking at 1 gb/sec along with regular rj-45, fire wire, and usb 2.0 built in surround sound card and wireless, and top of line video ports, bios would have a mini jump drive like thingy so if you fry it or flash it wrong you can easily replace it our fix it on a working computer
i bet i probably wont see this any time soon
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ck9: cpu doesnt help with graphics ... itld still suck no matter how good a cpu u got
Untrue, because the CPU has to tell the card what to draw.
Think a very high end video card in a machine with a 200mhz P1. Performance _will_ suffer...
Also, it's likely that a server CPU (such as the Opteron - I've never seen an opteron in a 'normal' workstation machine) might not have certain 'special' instructions that can speed some math and graphics operations. (MMX, SSE, 3DNow!, etc)
I could be wrong, but it really wouldn't surprise me.
As for having to rewrite the game, it does depend on how the game is structured, but the biggest factor is probably the operating system's SMP support. Assuming your OS supports SMP, if the game is already multithreaded, you might see a performance increase because the OS can execute the threads in the game process on multiple CPU's (up to 8 in this case, since dual core is pretty much two CPUs on a chip and the operating system and hardware treats it as such)
However, there is still only one video card in the system, and you could still have a bottleneck on the PCI / AGP bus or with the card itself.
Multithreading is also the reason that multiple processors really help on a server system. Most server software is multithreaded (or in some cases, Apache is one big example of this, uses multiple 'child' processes where it forks a new server process when an HTTP request comes in).
Basically these work by running a 'main' thread or process which waits for connections and then forks a child process or spawns a new thread and passes off the work to be done onto this new thread/process.
Anyway, there aren't a lot of games that run multiple threads out there. On single processor CPUs multiple threads for a game results in additional overhead and actually hurts rather than helps performance.
In the case where there is no multithreading (most commercial games since less than 1% of their users are going to have SMP systems), the only performance gain you can get is when the operating system pushes idle / background tasks to another processor (thus the game will have one or more processors almost completely to itself). This brings a minimal speed increase at best, and you probably won't notice any difference.
Moogle: 128 bit PPC processors do exist.
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xD I know its been a while but, I'll just throw this in the pot. Windows takes Dual core chips as one processor according to the license agreement since it only uses 1 socket. Only when you have more then 2 sockets will you need to get an enterprise license for Windows.
WinXP Home is really just a license for 1 socket, WinXP Pro is 2 sockets, and special WinXP flavors you get from signing an agreement directly with MS will entitle you to a 4 or more socket version. This is why it’s not possible to run 4 single core XEON’s with WinXP Pro. But, all the while it’s possible to run 2 Dual core (4 CPU) opteron’s or 1 Dual core P4 with hyper threading. (2 logical + 2 extended). The only P4 that you can run in a Dual socket config is the P4E which is also multiplier unlocked (4 Logical + 2 extended). That’ll make 8 cpu’s (kind of xD).
The Dual core idea was made so that servers can be made to run with Windows and not need an enterprise license from MS which is retarded expensive.
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Moogle: 128 bit PPC processors do exist.
Really??!!!! I want one !!! where can i get one !!! how much?
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no, they are 64bit procs with 128bit altivec extensions.
and yes, i know that hacker, but what i mean is no matter how good a cpu you got could be a pentium 500 at 200 jigahertz it still can be crippled by a subpar gfx card. in this case, a r9200 on PCI is still gonna be the bottleneck (severly). no matter how many cpus you got, in this case.
oprime: dual core is 2 cpus as the OS sees it and is treated as such.
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ck9: cpu doesnt help with graphics ... itld still suck no matter how good a cpu u got
from what I was reading on the ATI site, the RAGE XL is a very good vid card. Also, one of the higher performance RADEON cards is only $20, and there are 4 PCI slots which could easily handle it.
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xD I know its been a while but, I'll just throw this in the pot. Windows takes Dual core chips as one processor according to the license agreement since it only uses 1 socket. Only when you have more then 2 sockets will you need to get an enterprise license for Windows.
Well, there _are_ solutions to that (but posting them would violate the forum rules).
Yes, windows does know that a dual core CPU uses one socket but otherwise it acts like a 2-CPU SMP system.
If you really were going to run a machine with >2 cpu's though I really have to wonder why you wouldn't go with Linux, *BSD or some other unix variant out there.
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er, ck9 a mfgr will boast how good a card is regardless of its performance. and the Rage XL is _very_ _very_ old, and also the orignal radeon series. Performance is not great for any modern games on either of them, and they wont even support it. The best card you could get pci is a older radeon 9xxx series or nvidia 5x series (fx 5200 or r9200 are the only ones i know of. performance is not spectacular for either; they are the bottom of the line cards.; most pci are)
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There are some decent PCI vid card out there but they pale in comparison to the AGP and PCI E not any thing youll be playing quake 4 or Doom 3 on
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Your best bet would be to get a top of the line workstation PC. You'll probably end up paying less anyway, and it's going to be more capable at least for gaming.