[ubuntu-uk] OT CPU Advice

[Tony Travis]

Ian Pascoe wrote:
> Hi all
> 
> Somewhat OT, but I'm hoping someone here can help.
> 
> My Desktop MB is on the way out, intermittent strange behaviour, and it
> being some 8 years old and well used, I'm not really that surprised.
> 
> Now, as I hate wasting money I thought I'd get myself a new MB that would
> handle the current CPU, AND 1.6 GHz, and memory, but thought about going for
> a dual socket CPU board instead, and buy another CPU to boost performance.

Hello, Ian.

Eight years of progress is a l_o_n_g time according to Moore's law:

	http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law

My advice is to completely replace your motherboard, CPU and RAM because 
it is becoming difficult to source eight-year-old parts. It sounds like 
you have a Socket-A Athlon/Duron motherboard, with DDR memory. I've 
upgraded a few of our older Beowulf cluster compute nodes with a similar 
spec. to this using ASRock Socket-A motherboards:

	http://www.asrock.com/mb/overview.asp?Model=K7S41GX

These are pretty good, but you're going to struggle to find a suitable 
dual-processor Socket-A motherboard even if you find a second Athlon 
1600XP+ to use in it.

> I realise that the make and clock speed of the CPU has to be the same, but
> does it have to be from the same family of CPU's?  The PSU, at 350w, should
> be more than capable as the only other large power draw, the graphics
> system, is, by today's standards, fairly medioca, but it suits.

Generally, dual processors are designed to be used as such, although 
they can be used singly. It's rumoured you can pair up standard Athlon 
XP's by making hardware modifications to them but the Athlon 'MP's are 
what you would normally put into dual socket motherboards...

> I should add that I'm not going to attempt this upgrade, but am going to let
> the local computer shop that originally built it, do it, but I wanted to do
> some research first so that I didn't get blinded by the sales pitch, or tech
> talk.

Why? - It's not rocket science replacing a motherboard: You could spend 
the money you would otherwise have to pay them to do it for you on a new 
CPU + RAM + motherboard bundle, and learn a lot doing it yourself :-)

Maplin have some good bundles:

	http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?ModuleNo=221373

I've found that they are helpful with advice about construction too.

Bye,

	Tony.
-- 
Dr. A.J.Travis, University of Aberdeen, Rowett Institute of Nutrition
and Health, Greenburn Road, Bucksburn, Aberdeen AB21 9SB, Scotland, UK
tel +44(0)1224 712751, fax +44(0)1224 716687, http://www.rowett.ac.uk
mailto:a.travis at abdn.ac.uk, http://bioinformatics.rri.sari.ac.uk/~ajt