Installation

In the past, putting together a multiprocessor system was cost prohibitive and only extreme hardware freaks like Kenn went through all the trouble of setting one up. The BP6 and Celeron processors remove the SMP cost and technical knowledge barriers, and now anyone who can build a plain vanilla system can put together a dual Celeron machine.

Setting up the dual Celeron system was just as easy as putting together a normal single CPU system. The BP6 motherboard, as with all the current Abit motherboards, is fairly simple to configure. There aren't any jumpers to configure because Abit's Soft Menu II handles all the multiplier, FSB, and voltage settings. The only difference between putting together a dual processor system and a single processor system the installation of the second CPU, and you just pop that badboy in just like the first one. Everything else is the same.

We put the system together, turned on the power, and went straight to the soft menu. We first set the CPU to the correct 366MHz speed (5.5 x 66). We did an fdisk, and installed Windows 98. Then we tried 5.5 x 100, 550MHz @2.0V. It worked perfectly, and we left it running Seti for a day to see if the system was stable.

Operating System

Uh oh. Windows 95/98 doesn't support multiple processors. You can still run Win98, but one processor will just sit idle, and that's wasteful. There are a few operating systems that support SMP. We'll have to install Windows NT, Windows 2000 Beta 3, Linux, FreeBSD, or BeOS to take advantage of the second processor. Windows NT is the easiest option if you're used to Win98, but some might see this as an opportunity to learn Linux. Red Hat Linux 6.0 has multiple processor installation support, and a beginner can just as easily start learning Linux with a dual CPU box as with a single CPU system.

Windows NT sacrifices performance for stability. In almost all cases, games in Win98 will perform worse in a Windows NT environment (if the game can even run in NT). We went with Windows NT Workstation 4.0 with Service Pack 4. We tried Service Pack 5, but we ran into some software compatibility problems.

Here's a word from our previous dual Celeron article about adding another processor to an existing NT installation:

You can't just stick 2 processors into an existing session of NT and expect it to work. In most cases you'll need to reinstall the OS to support multiprocessing. Fortunately, this isn't always necessary. If you have access to the Microsoft NT Resource Kit Support Tools, you can use an included applet called uptomp.exe to upgrade your existing install. The utility is included free in the Microsoft Management Console. In either case, it's highly recommended that you reinstall Service Pack 3 or 4 after you run uptomp.exe and BEFORE you reboot.

Once NT recognizes your multiprocessor system, you'll see "2 Processors" in the familiar blue startup screen. Task Manager will also show each CPU separately.