Dual Pentium III deskside tower


 
Click here for more pictures. This deskside tower has been painted to look better, look how ugly it was before.

General Technical Information

HOSTNAME TARKUS
SYSTEM CPU 2 x Intel Pentium III Coppermine @1100MHz
CACHE (2nd, 1st D/I) 2 x 256 KB, 16 KB / 16 KB
RAM  512 MB PC-133 SDRAM  (Max. 1024 MB)
IDE BUS 2 x Ultra ATA (Max. 66.6 MB/s) and 2 x Promise Ultra ATA (Max. 100 MB/s)
SCSI BUS
 		1 x Ultra160 SCSI LVD (Max. 160 MB/s) Adaptec 19160 host adapter card
OPTION BUS 1 x AGP slot, 5 x PCI slots and 2 x ISA slots
GRAPHICS Gainward GeForce2 MX400 64MB AGP Max. 1792x1344 for 32-plane @75Hz
DISPLAY
 		19" Nokia 930C Flat Trinitron (CRT) monitor*
HARD DISK DRIVES 36GB IBM 10K RPM U160 SCSI (system disk), 18GB Seagate Cheetah 10K RPM U160, 120GB Maxtor  7200 RPM ATA-100
DVD DRIVE 8x NEC Dual Layer DVD+-R/RW DVD Writer ATA-33
FLOPPY DRIVE
 		1.44MB Floppy drive
NETWORK 10/100baseT noname network card
AUDIO SoundBlaster Live! Platinum PCI card and onboard AC97 chip
OS Windows 2000 SP4, and sometimes KNOPPIX
YEAR 2000
SPEED 1100 VAX MIPS per processor (about 2200 VAX MIPS total, for applications that use multi-threading )
COMMENTS This computer is my fastest one to work with at home. At work I use an IBM T41, a P4 (Centrino) built 2004, but that computer is slower on some things, it's just a laptop.
ESTIMATED PRICE '00
 		N/A (the system's configuration has changed too much, over the years ...)
*= this monitor is shared with five of my other systems, it's connected to a 4-port KVM switch (the 5th system is connected to the BNC connectors on the monitor)

Windows System Information


History and other comments

I've built this system from scratch. The motherboard, MSI-6321 was selected because it was the only (cheaper) board to work with my Compaq Dual Channel U2W SCSI card. At first I installed a single Intel Celeron II 533MHz on the mainboard. This CPU could be overclocked to run at 850MHz. Not bad. Unfortunately, you can't get a dual processor configuration (very easily at least ...) using Intel Celeron II CPUs, so the goal was to, at some point, upgrade to two Pentium III processors.

I waited quite a long time, but the prices on P3 never really dropped, drastically. Even when P4 came along, which puzzles me ...maybe P4 was not that much of a good upgrade?  - I could buy that :-)

In other words, to buy a dual processor board in the first place was not really a very good investment, the CPUs were simply not worth the money, at least 1999 - 2001. At some point I had a single Celeron 1GHz installed, because of Intel's evil pricing.  In 2002, however, I decided to buy the P3 CPUs, before Coppermine would dissapear completely from the market, but still those CPU were the most expensive ones I've ever bought. I understand why so many people buy AMD; too bad they didn't have multi processor support before Athlon MP.

My current configuration, with two CPUs, I'd say this peecee box performs even like a real computer. I mean, you can do several thing at once without everything locking up etc. etc. I'd recommend dual CPUs to anyone that runs more than one big application at a time. Applications seem to launch faster, application crashes don't lock up your whole system and you can easily run as many applications you want at the same time, are some examples of the benefits you'll get from having a dual CPU system. Frankly, I don't care what some benchmarks show; it simply works better with two CPUs!
 
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Last updated:  6-12-2004