This is the best dual processor deal I've seen - just bought one myself

theigloo wrote on 5/3/2002, 2:19 PM

Check it out:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=2021314013

You can also upgrade the RAM and the drives. This is about $900 cheaper than I've seen anywhere else. I don't know how they're doing it.

I bought one and upgraded the ram to a gig and the drives to the new Western Digital 120 gigers with 8mb of cache. At tomshardware.com they benchmark faster than scsi. My total was $2070.

I have not recieved it yet, but my dealings with them were great - they said they put it together and tested it before shipping it.

Matt.
www.theigloo.com

Comments

theigloo wrote on 5/6/2002, 2:44 PM
I'm responding just to get this back to the top of the list... this deal is too good to pass up... get'em while they're hot.
vitamin_D wrote on 5/6/2002, 7:01 PM
"I have not recieved it yet..."

Famous last words :/

Good luck!
theigloo wrote on 5/7/2002, 3:00 PM
Just got it today! Installed XP on it with no problem. Here comes Vegas!
Who-ha!
rtoledo wrote on 5/7/2002, 5:52 PM
my sympathies go out to you. I hope you are not getting a ATI AIW 8500DV, or you just bought a DUD!

BTW the power suppply they have is "somewhat" marginal for this motherboard or the one I currently have.

I had that MB for 1 week and took it back and gave them 20% re-stocking to get it off my hands!

do a search on www.2cpu.com forums

for this kind of money you can put a dual XEON machine. that will be a lot more stable than the 760mpx chipset is.
DougHamm wrote on 5/8/2002, 12:58 PM
The 8500 family of video cards work great with Vegas Video in single and dual monitor configurations. The 8500DV is clocked slower than a regular 8500, has firewire, and a digital TV tuner. I can't comment on the firewire performance through the card, and a TV tuner isn't high on my priority list either, but I can say that the general features of the 8500 are more than enough for video editing purposes. I use a regular 8500 (275/275) with dual monitors and the display quality is top-notch.

Wait...unless you mean there's no such thing as an AIW 8500DV, in which case you are indeed right. It's either an 8500DV, or an AIW 8500. The latter has an analogue tuner and is clocked at faster (275/275) speeds - and has no firewire.

Take care,

-Doug

-Doug
kosstheory wrote on 5/25/2002, 1:00 PM
I have gotten excellent results with the following system:

Dual AMD Athlon MP 2000+ processors
ASUS A7M266-D Motherboard
1 GB PC2100 DDR RAM ECC

When Rendering From DV to DV I achieved 100% CPU usage on both CPUs for the duration of the render, which was quite fast! I was in awe! Seeing those frames shoot by on the preview was a sight for sore eyes. I've never seen anything quite so beautiful.

A lot of people say that the AMD Athlon MP processors are not stable enough to compete with the P4s. This baby is rock steady! I can throw anything at it, and it just gobles it up, and keeps on trucking. And I saved hundreds!

One thing that I am a little concerned about is the CPU usage during other types of renders. Like the mpg2 file I'm rendering right now. The CPUs are only being used to 50%. I suppose that the main concept mpeg2 encoder has no optimization for dual cpus? Looking at the performance tab of the task manager, it looks like CPU 1 is at about 80% and 2 seems to vary between 20% and 30%. There was an earlier post that stated that dual processor support for activities other than DV encoding might use one processor for decoding, and one for encoding. I suppose what the performance tab is showing might be proving that this scenario is true.

I hope that future releases of the main concept mpeg2 codec included with vegas will utilize the dual cpu configuration more efficiently. It is a puzzle why 100% of atleast one of the CPUs isn't being employed. As it is 80+20=100. So, I would probably get about the same results with a single CPU when doing anything other than DV encoding. Oh well. Maybe they should advertise it as "Limited" Dual CPU support, until it's further optomized?

Just my 2 cents