Today I got the first few parts of my latest addition to my PC setup. A mainboard, memory modules and 2 CPUs.
As you can read in the title of today’s post, the mainboard is a Tyan Tiger MPX. By far not the latest model available from Tyan, but that is what second hand market is for.
2 Athlon MP 2400+ CPUs will do service as processors and while not the most powerfull anymore, they are more than adequate.
The mainboard
A good thing about second hand hardware is that it is mostly a lot cheaper than new hardware. If I had to buy a new dual socket mainboard (for an Intel Xeon or an AMD Opteron) with both CPU’s and memory modules, then I’m sure that I couldn’t afford it. Those things are way to expensive. So then a little outdated hardware at a price that is very well affordable is a good deal.
So the Tyan Tiger MPX is a dual socket 462 (also known as socket A) mainboard that supports 2 Athlon MP processors, has a 266mhz frontside bus and supports up to 4GB of RAM.
Specs:
- Socket: 2x socket 462
- Chipset: AMD-760 MPX
- Slots: 2x 3.3v 64-bit PCI, 4x 5v 32-bit PCI, 1x AGP 2x/4x
- Memorybanks: 4, max 4GB
- Onboard peripherals: 2x IDE ATA100, 1x floppy
- External peripherals: 2x USB 1.1, 1x 10/100 ethernet, 1x LPT, 2x COM
Processors
The Athlon MP is basicly an Athlon XP with one minor difference: one of the dummy pins on the Athlon XP has been replaced with a CPU synchronisation pin which is connected to some complicated circuitry to enable multiprocessing. This means that, unlike the Athlon XP, multiple Athlon MP CPUs can be used on one mainboard. Now with the dual-core technology coming up really quickly, the need for dual processors isn’t all that great anymore for home use, but since this one is allready 2.5 years old, I’m sure it has served it’s purpose very well in the past. Now it’s Athlon 64 and Opteron from AMD, instead of Athlon XP and Athlon MP.
Now all I need is a case and a PSU and I’m ready to go.
yeah, you have the same mobo as me. Vmware works really really sweet on it (only drawback is that the memory is bloody expensive to upgrade and 1.5 gig is gone with just a few machines up and running :/ )
I might be installing VMWare on it at some point, but at the moment I have far from enough harddisk space for it to do that. So I think that it’ll have to do with a single OS for the time being. I haven’t yet decided which one.
[...] In my previous post I told you about the dual socket motherboard (or mainboard if you will) that I bought and now, almost a few days later, it’s a fully assembled pc. [...]