Dual Proccesors - what are they good for?

**BlackBeard** · 15th October 2002

I've bought a dual mobo and a couple of old PII 266's - what will this 'mini-beast' be good for?

I shall probablt make it into a webserver but I was wondering about video processing

**Violator** · 15th October 2002

No good for gaming anyway. Might be OK for 3d work etc/video. But any software has to be written to take advantage of more than one processor, which is why it's useless for games. And with dual p2 266s?? you'd be better off with one decent processor to be honest. Or crunch for Genome

**PimpMasterT** · 15th October 2002

Processors run on what is called time slicing

u have app 1
and app 2

what it does

if you run both it looks like this

12121212

it seems like it's doing both at once but it just runs snipets of opcodes from each part of the app so really in that instance the app doesn't get full speed of the cpu

but with dual cpus you get full speed of the app

so theoretically you can burn 2 cds using two apps, if you have a hardrive capable of pushing a high throughput

**znaylor** · 30th October 2002

You could theoretically run type up documents in Word whilst watching dodgy films with no slowdown!

Now thats multitasking!

**BlackBeard** · 1st November 2002

Originally posted by znaylor
You could theoretically run type up documents in Word whilst watching dodgy films with no slowdown!

Now thats multitasking!

Thats the sort of response I was looking for

- anyway I'm up to a threobing twin 400Mhz PII - very fast at rendering and proccessing videos etc. - most of the time no faster than my old 266

**Violator** · 1st November 2002

Originally posted by BlackBeard

Thats the sort of response I was looking for - anyway I'm up to a threobing twin 400Mhz PII - very fast at rendering and proccessing videos etc. - most of the time no faster than my old 266

As I said, the software has to be coded to take advantage of the extra processor, simply having two does not make your system faster.