Many of you may have heard of EPoX by now
simply because of the fact that they manufacture some very good motherboards.
They have been in the business since 1989 and were the first to
release a motherboard based on the 82430FX chipset in 1995 and the first
motherboard based on the VIA VP-1 chipset. Since then, they have grown
steadily and gained the respect of the industry because of their
attention to detail and stability.
In this review, we'll be taking a look at the
EPoX BXB-S Dual Slot-1 motherboard which also has an onboard Ultra2
Wide SCSI controller. Until recently, dual processor motherboards were
only the realm of servers and people who had lots of money. Now,
dual processing is starting to become a very mainstream thing.
Celerons are extremely cheap, so popping in a couple PPGA Celeron 300A's or
366's with a couple Slocket's (Slot-1 to Socket-370 converter cards)
is actually quite affordable.
To reap the benefits of dual processing you
must have an SMP (symmetrical multiprocessing) capable operating
system such as Windows NT 4. However, when Windows 2000 is
released I believe a lot more people will be opting to run that
operating system and dual processing will become even more mainstream.
Other than the operating system you also need
applications which take advantage of SMP such as 3D Studio MAX, Adobe
Photoshop or Microsoft Visual Studio. Most of us don't use these
programs enough to justify spending more money on an SMP
machine. However as many of you heard, Quake III Arena already
has SMP support and performance gains of 40-80% can be expected.
Quake III is the first game to support SMP, but you can expect this to
become a trend in the next few years. Why are games going to use
multi-processors? Well, the reason is simple, games
are becoming extremely complex and 3D video accelerators are quickly
becoming more powerful than CPU's. Today's fastest 3D
accelerators are constantly waiting for the CPU to send them data and
the next generation will further increase the gap. Since processors
advance a lot slower than 3D accelerators, the next natural step is
use two processors instead of one. With prices as low as they
are, you may find yourself looking for a dual-processing rig for your
next system.
