Am4 Dual Socket Motherboard

[Jesper Sahu]

Iinstalled a single Opteron CPU into a dual-socket mainboard Super Micro H8DGi-F and now I'm facing the problem that I can only use one PCI-e 16x slot, although there are 3 of them on the board. I've plugged in multiple video cards, but there's only one that is recognized by the OS.

This is because part of the PCIe lanes and part of the memory banks are routed to a specific CPU. If that CPU is not present then you can not use it. (This is because the modern CPU contain the PCIe and the memory controllers).

Using all x16 lanes for a card is more or less standard, but there is no theoretical reason why you can not put a graphical card in a smaller length slot. It will be slowly slower (around 5-10% for most midlevel cards, see benchmarks on tomsHardware, Anandtech and similar sites) but it will work.

Dual 386 computer existed in the form of the Compaq SystemPro, but it was only supported by Windows NT 3.1. (It was a custom, asymetric design). As you can see in the picture, there were actually processor daughterboards, not just sockets on the mainboard. You can find a nice file-server comparison including 386 SystemPro in InfoWorld (browse to page 55, there's some problem with googles page numeration). I can't think of any other computer using more than one 386 CPU. There were more dual (and more) 486 based servers, but these were mostly custom designs. (If you browse the pictures on1 and 2 on stason, you probably find some dual 486 motherboards). Dual processor workstation motherboards become more popular with the Pentium and the 430NX chipset (motherboards like Tyan S1462 @stason, manual).

Yeah if we obey the rules we can see the gems that are on this forum. And yes I must say, that this forum is really a fountain of knowledge. And me ? I am just trying to hold on and learn as much as possible from the other guys.

And I speak highly in regards to this forum because of its living information database of knowledge between the members.

Out of the box NT 3.1 supports only custom multiprocessor servers like the SystemPro, Wyse or AST. You won't be able to run it on an MPS compliant motherboard unless you get the MP specification v1.1 HAL installation kit.

This essay is going to tell you something about the motherboards of dual-CPU. Read it through and find the information you want. Also, you can read more relative knowledge on MiniTool Partition Magic official website.

Dual CPU motherboard refers to a motherboard with two CPUs or processors. Usually, this kind of motherboards have two CPU sockets to hold the chipsets. And, dual processor motherboards usually have better performance (if not double powerful) than single CPU motherboard, such as faster speed.

Besides faster responding speed, dual-CPU motherboards are also equipped with many PCIe slots, SATA and M.2 ports, which enables you to add more GPUs, RAM chips and storage drives, thus to upgrade your graphics card, memory card, as well as storage space for better visual and computer performance.

Another advantage of dual CPU mobo is that it saves space compared with a common single CPU board. Especially for cloud computing and data centers, using dual-processor or quad-processor motherboards will decrease the number of computers, thus save much physical space for containing those machines.

Dual-CPU mainboards are usually used for servers and high-end enterprise workstations. They work on tons of tasks from server farms and cloud-based services for people. Also, dual-processor is capable of complex video editing and rendering large movie scenes.

In the old days, when the processors are limited to 4 or 8 cores, in order to build a powerful workstation at a relatively low price, adopt a dual socket motherboard or multiple CPU board is a good choice.

Therefore, you do not have to get the most recent CPU, instead, gather several old CPUs together on a multi-CPU motherboard. The latter will probably bring you much better computer performance than the former.

Of course, you can! Game players or video streamers can make use of a dual CPU motherboard to play video games or capture videos. Or, one person can stream his gameplay while gaming on the same machine, which is easier than operating on two PCs.

However, nowadays, the dual CPU gaming motherboards or multiple-CPU mobos are less popular. If you would like to have a computer with extremely faster speed, higher FPS, etc., you can take the newest AMD Threadripper CPU (supporting hyperthreading) motherboard for productivity-level tasks; if you want to stream while you are playing games, you can have an Intel Core i9 9900K or AMD Ryzen 9 3900X for streaming and gaming at the same time.

Since you can only use one CPU to handle your game at the same time, the other CPU will stay idle or just handle other processes. Therefore, generally, for gaming, a dual-processor motherboard is not necessary.

Dual CPU motherboard does exist, like dual CPU motherboard i7, dual AMD CPU motherboard, and dual CPU motherboard Xeon. Yet, they are mostly for servers and workstations instead of mainstream consumer computers.

After reading some forums here and talking with some other people is it worth building a computer with 2 cpus? When rendering in final quality everything is getting pulled from the cpu and not the gpu. is vectorworks compatible with a dual cpu motherboard? or in v20 is there a change in vectorworks where all rendering will be pulled from the gpu?

Hi @cwetstein I'll answer the Renderworks part of the question. It will still be using CPU only, as RW is based on the CineRender engine and CineRender doesn't have GPU accelerated renderings as of version 20.

I don't think it's worth it. If the performance of the 32-core threadripper isn't enough for you yet, you'd probably still be cheaper with a second threadripper computer than with a dual processor xeon board. With Cinema4D you have the possibility to combine the computing power of both computers.

Here is the cinebench of a 64-core dual xeon computer. It gets a score of 5626. But one xeon processor costs as much as my hole threadripper computer. The 32-core Threadripper gets nearly the same score (5677).

The Threadripper 2990wx actually is the best you coul'd get for cpu rendering with cinema4d/vectorworks. The only systems that beat it are very expensive dual and more prozessor xeon machines. But for the price of these systems you coul'd also get yourself several threadripper machines that you use together with cinema 4d pro. So nothing beats the threadripper in cpu rendering atm.

Ubuntu's system monitor shows CPU usage for each core separately. I have a motherboard with two CPU sockets and want to know how much CPU on socket0 is loaded and how much CPU on socket1 is loaded. How can this be done?

The reason I want to know this is that when I run a specific program, the CPU on socket1 is much hotter than the CPU on socket2. First, I'm going to know if the two CPU's are loaded equally. Then, if that is the case, I can be sure that it is an issue with the cooling system (i.e. Fan, Heatsink, thermal paste, etc.).

Since the Intel 5500 and 5520 series chipset had an IOH northbridge, populating only one CPU slot in the dual socket motherboard did not cut out any additional motherboard resources. In the Intel socket LGA1366 days, and with the AMD C32 and G34 platforms, both the northbridge and southbridge were found on the motherboard so the CPUs generally connected through the northbridge to get to an expansion card bus. In these systems, the main impact of only having one CPU (other than the obvious loss in CPU performance without the second CPU) is that one could not populate the memory banks for the empty processor slot. This is very similar to the single CPU nodes we use for the STH colocation project, even though each Dell C6100 node is dual processor capable.

Underneath those heatsinks on the upper node sits only one processor despite the board being dual-processor capable. One can also see that the associated DRAM bank is filled with DDR3 RDIMMs while the empty socket is utilizing DIMM blanks. This setup is much different than a more modern LGA2011 dual Intel Xeon motherboard. Here is an example of a Supermicro X9DRH-7TF which has both onboard LSI SAS and Intel X540 10GbE:

Here we can see that if CPU1 was missing, the onboard Intel X540 10GbE LAN and LSI SAS2208 controller do not have a PCIe but to hang off of. Conversely, with no CPU2, one would not have access to several PCIe 3.0 x8 slots. Luckily, most motherboard manufacturers state in their manuals which socket to populate.

It should be fine. Depending on the processor you may lose PCIe lanes, DIMM slots and of course CPU cores. If you need any of that functionality, then that is where you will run into issues. But from an OS perspective, Ubuntu will be fine if you just remove a CPU and RAM.

If I run four cpus and have dual boot. One being windows server to utilize all four and windows 7 or 10 to utilize just two cpus.

Would there be any conflict in running windows 7 which only recognizes two cpus while the other two (all four) are installed. Besides the fact that the cpus not being used and there associated ports ect not being accessible?

3a8082e126