-=DVF=- Gaming Community

Lo,

Does anyone know about Xeon chips or have 1 or 2. Can you run these with jus tthe 1 chip in or do you have to have dual chips? Are they quicker than say a quicker single chip? I presume it must be but how much. I am asking because the new Nvidia SLI setup for dual graphics cards with PCI Express as far as I know has to use a Xeon chip/board.

The Xeon chips are basically server-grade CPUs. They can be used
singularly just fine. Xeons do tend to be a little faster than their equivalent
P4 as they tend to have larger amounts of onboard cache. The P4EE
(Extreme Edition) is a Xeon chip in a P4 package. They can be run in both
single and dual configurations. A dual setup will be quicker than a single
chip only if you have an OS that recognises the 2 CPUs and have software
that is multi-threaded. If not, it won't be much quicker at all as one CPU
will remain idle.

As for nVIDIAs SLI, I'm not sure it requires a dual Xeon, rather it
requires a motherboard with dual PCI-Express 16x slots. Currently, the
only choice, I believe, is a dual Xeon board. In the next few months, I'm
sure we'll see a few more manufacturers bring out motherboards with
dual PCI-Express 16x slots on them.

HTH

Cheers matey.