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As mentioned earlier the BIOS is pretty boring from an overclocking perspective - more interesting for what's not there than what is.
The next two are unusual however - apparently if you try to boot into Win98/95 with 2 CPU's installed the machine will lock hard unless you set "Other" in the BIOS. The right picture below shows the option to enable/disable "Super Bypass". This feature carries over in the AMD750-derived AMD760 chipset on this board but is not shown in the Tyan BIOS. The AMD reference BIOS has it, but apparently you can only enable it (or rather, it only stays enabled) when you have a single CPU installed. If you've got 2 CPU's installed then you don't get the extra memory bandwidth that Super Bypass provides. For more info on Super Bypass check out this article on InsaneHardware.
Anyway, the 2 CPU's with the board are the new Palomino processors, which will be called a variety of things including Athlon4 and AthlonMP. Note that the core is slightly larger and more square than we're used to on Thunderbird-based Athlons (see this nasty pic for reference) and Durons. Palomino brings a range of improvements to the Athlon line including lower power consumption and SSE - for full details read this AnandTech article.
Bob says, as we've heard elsewhere, that AMD only certify that the Palomino - specifically the AthlonMP - CPU's will work in SMP systems. However, he says he has had dual Thunderbirds and dual Durons POSTING with the beta Tyan BIOS - unfortunately we couldn't replicate that, with the AMD reference BIOS my 2x Duron 700's produced a black screen only.
Now for some benchmarks. First up, SiSoft Sandra 2001se:
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Notice that the dual Palomino system uses SSE in the multimedia benchmark. Palomino apparently has a full SSE implementation - you can even select "Pentium III Optimisation" in 3DMark2001 on this system, apparently. The next two pics show the memory benchmark in comparison to a few of the reference systems.
If you're interested in what else Sandra had to say about this system, download the system report file here.
Next, MadOnion's 3DMark2001:
The score itself is not all that interesting because the system was limited by the GeForce2 GTS Pro installed - still, for those who've just gotta know:
More interesting is what the System Info section had to say. It identified the CPU's as Palominos and not just Athlons - quite a bit of info there in fact:
Not really a benchmark, but of course we have the ubiquitous "Task Manager showing 2 CPU's" shot. That was taken just after running a little bit of the 3DMark2001 demo - interesting that both CPU's were kept fairly busy there.
Next we have a little Linux action - this is the login screen to Mandrake, showing 2 CPU's:
I have an excerpt from the system log during bootup, so if you want to see what the kernel thinks of the board, it's right here.
Finally, AMD's own N-Bench, which seems to not be SMP aware and doesn't identify the CPU(s) as Palomino, merely Athlon.. and you can't turn SSE on either, which is weird. I figured people would ask though, so here you go:
The full report from N-Bench is here.
Last coupla pics are kinda silly. :) For the skeptics, here's a shot of my business card (with phone numbers distorted out) resting on the motherboard:
One last picture:
Intel Man stumbles, as we did, across the AMD SMP monster. Does he lay down the smack, or does he flee in terror? Only time will tell. :)
Many, many thanks to "Bob", without whom none of this would have been possible.
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