power supply

[goldfinger]

I am going to get a dual amd mp1800+, and the chieftec dragon big tower 340watt.

Is 340 watt enough, or do you have to buy 550w?

And is dual cpu, stable with all soft and hardware?

[saVe]

don't know about the power supply but i would suggest you take the BIGGER one, because you never know what's gonna come (geforce 5 :D ).

dual cpus run stable but only apps coded for two cpus can take advantage of them. can't say what advantage there is for dual cpu with divx conversion...

[LotionBoy]

dual-cpus. Nandub often uses 70-80 percent of availible CPU power, so it has tasks that can be split to different CPUs, even though it is not fully a dual program.

As for the PS, it depends on the motherboard. the Tyan THunder needs a 460W supply. The Tiger is more than happy with 350.

LotionBoy

[dub_lover]

I don't know if any conversion software is dual processor capable but you could always run two separate jobs simultaneously. At work I have a dual processor machine and I can do my number-crunching and run MS Word (bloatware!) at the same time. Brilliant!:)

[triffid]

The best place to find out about this stuff is 2CPU.com's forums...

personally, i'm attracted to the new ASUS mobo with the AMD 760MPX...its brand new.

The cost is a little more, but you make that up easily because if you only use 2 of the 4 dimm slots it can take unregistered DDR ram, big money saved there, and for encoding you dont need more than 512MB. Only problem with it is that it has some new style pci slots that arent supported by many cards and is not backwards-compatible despite what Asus says. However, so far it seems the more stable of the two.

For the power supply, i'd put a 400 on the Tyan Tiger, 450 on the Asus. Before getting either, though, read up on them in 2CPU.com's forums. I am planning to build the same comp u are, dual XP 1800's, and i'm leaning towards the Asus because the Tyan is very very picky about non-registered ram, which is quite a bit more per dimm, esp at current prices.

For OS, dont get anything short of Windows 2000 or XP Pro (NOT XP HOME, because i dont think it has multiprocessor support). Windoes 2000/XP pro both (as i understand) make use of both processors even if the program itself doesnt fully support it, just not as well as if the program had support.

I'm not sure about nandub, but virtualdub may have SMP support in the works, just not yet. However, dual processor home computers are getting cheaper, so its just a matter of time before dvd encoding software begins supporting it.

-my two cents
-triffid

[da franksta]

I would recommend a 400+W PSU. Especially if you're thinking of a RAID system, a DVD, a CDR-writer etc it wouldn't hurt to have a little extra.

Personally, I would go for the likes of Enermax 431W (whichever model you prefer).

Hope this helps.

[Scuba]

I had much slower computers Exploding with bigger PSU's :(

Get a Enermax 550W and sleep in a quite mind.

[theReal]

Only get an Enermax PSU if you don't need the 5V line to be reliable.

For example, the combination of an Epox 8K7A plus Athlon 1400 is a disaster with Enermax PSU's, even with the stronger 430W ones...

Read the amdmb.com forums if you're interested in a great variety of PSU-problems (people there will probably tell you to get a Sparcle or Antec PSU). More Watts doesn't exactly mean "better" all the time...

[fisix]

asus mpx board manual suggests 450W. id get the appropriate enermax whisper board