hey , i was just wondering if anyone could help me on this matter , i was getting a new amd athlon 1.8g cpu put into my comp , but i was told that you could put two cpus into the same comp say two amd athlon 1.6's , now is this possible? , and would doing this over heat the computer ,and would this save a bit of money as well, it would be good if someone can help me on this one,ty

Yes it can be done. yes you need a motherboard that supports it. Yes it would be expensive. Yes if you tried to put two processors on a motherboard that supports one would be stupid and impossible.

There are a handfull of motherboards that support two processors but i doubt you should do this unless you do something like movie editing or something of the sort.

You should also know that unless your OS and the software support it, you won't see any performance increase with a dual CPU setup. What I mean is that Win9x won't recognise the second CPU. Some I'm not sure about but I know that Win2K, and XP Pro both support it, not sure about XPHome. I'm also not sure about configs of Linux and other OSes.

The main advantage of a dual CPU system is for servers and graphics workstations.

It would be a waste to build a gaming machine using dual CPUs.

I have a couple of duallies and love them very much. They are some of the most useful machines I've ever owned (even for gaming since I can burn something or whatever in the background while playing.) But if you don't have things set up to take advantage of it then it's a waste of money and time. Flavors of NT and the *nix and even Be support multiple CPUs but as said earlier you have to have a dual CPU capable mobo. Mac OSX (I'm a big fan) also supports multiple CPUs now. Dual CPU mobos are getting pretty cheap these days and pretty common as well.

One more idea - there are cases out there modified to hold two complete machines within them. Two mobos, to processors (or sets if the mobos are duallies), two of everything... Maybe that would be of interest to you but you will probably be dealing with more heat that way and probably more expense as well.

Hope that helps.

LNCPapa

Unix and linux have support for dual cpus, a company i rent a server from, runs on dual 2.4 ghz Xeon processors and on Linux.