Dual CPU motherboard question

[icebreaker]

Hi, I was planning on buying the Asus Z10PE-D16 WS motherboard supporting two cpu sockets and purchasing another 5960x and another 64gb of RAM. I was just wondering if isboxer is compatible with two CPU's and handles them properly with round robin etc? Has anyone tried this? Anyway I currently have an asus ramapge v extreme with an 5960x, 3 titan x hybrid (mostly SLI for GTA and other graphicintensive games), ddr4 64gb 2800mhz, 1tb samsung 850 pro ssd, and a evga supernova 1600w t2 psu, and a h110i gtx corsair water cooler.

[mbox_bob]

Yes.

Dual CPU compatibility was a thing from back in the old days when you had single core/thread CPU's, and you had to use special compiler flags to set in order to add in the necessary overhead for multi CPU systems (plus you had to have a different OS too, so that made a difference). With modern multi-core CPU's and multithreaded OS's, and gigabytes of ram rather than megabytes, the worry and overhead of multi-cpu/threaded applications are long gone.

Multi-CPU is handled at the OS, and the applications are just presented with a bunch of extra cores/threads, they don't know there is more than one CPU underneath it, that is for the OS to care and manage.

[icebreaker]

Ok, great then I might buy it. Is this recommended by the way or is a new rig recommended instead?

[mbox_bob]

Well, I wouldn't buy two 5960X's for it (or even one). While they will fit in the socket, and might work if you only filled one socket, they have no QPI links so the CPU's wont talk to each other; and the chipset may object to one without the QPI link, even if it isn't used when only one socket is populated.

You need to put Xeons in this board, any of the 2xxx-V3 series (the 2 indicating it is for Dual CPU boards such as this one) should work. The nomenclature goes on about the E5-2600 v3 family so it may be restricted to this series only.

[icebreaker]

Well, I wouldn't buy two 5960X's for it (or even one). While they will fit in the socket, and might work if you only filled one socket, they have no QPI links so the CPU's wont talk to each other; and the chip set may object to one without the QPI link, even if it isn't used when only one socket is populated.

You need to put Xeons in this board, any of the 2xxx-V3 series (the 2 indicating it is for Dual CPU boards such as this one) should work. The nomenclature goes on about the E5-2600 v3 family so it may be restricted to this series only.

Thanks lol. I read the CPU specification and it says for Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2600 v3 product family (stupid me) so definitively not the extreme editions. Damn I wish the 5960x had QPI. Would been a great money saver but I will just buy another system then with one titan x or transfer one from my computer now over to my new rig. My dream though would be to purchase two Xeon chips the new e7 18core one x2 for a total of 72 threads but not spending that amount of money on multi-boxing.

[Catamer]

nice system per say, I hope you live in Alaska because that sounds like a really fast 1500 watt space heater... ( i know my PC seems to warm things up here )

[CMKCot]

i would hold on the purchase, going for a Dual CPU solution is incredibly risky if you don't know what you are doing. so far you've been presented with 3 things you didn't know about and should you have bought the hardware you would end up with it sitting there looking pretty. also, being restricted to Server CPUs means changing the ram for Server grade... not good at all. in the end whatever extra cores you gain, will result in a negligible performance increase due to the slow RAM, and the weaker cores.

a better solution and much easier to set up would be to invest on a second PC (i7 at most), and link them using the multi PC functionality that IsBoxer has.

keep the main power rig for your main group, then the second PC running the filler characters.

and btw, im assuming you are running at least 20 clients. anything under that and you are just throwing money away, and any performance problem is more likely due to poor configuration on your side rather than some hardware bottleneck.

i would look at those titanXs, SLI setups run like ass with multiple instances of the same program.