Best Multi-chip multi-core mobo question

Hi,

The question is as per title : I'm thinking of upgrading my PC and I
wondered what is the best liked multiple-chip dual or quad core
motherboard at the moment ? I am not a gamer or overclocker but I do
develop software and would like high performance.

Just to throw another dice amongst the pidgeons, I would prefer
something that can have quiet coolers fitted to the CPUs.

Many thanks,

Mike

> The question is as per title : I'm thinking of upgrading my PC and I
> wondered what is the best liked multiple-chip dual or quad core
> motherboard at the moment ? I am not a gamer or overclocker but I do
> develop software and would like high performance.
>
> Just to throw another dice amongst the pidgeons, I would prefer
> something that can have quiet coolers fitted to the CPUs.

I too am a software engineer and I can say my recent upgrade to dual core
was a waste of time for software development. Visual Studio 2005 doesn't
make use of both cores during a compile and while my Core 2 Duo is faster
than my Athlon 2400+, I am disappointed with the improvement - the second
core just sits around doing tiny windows tasks for most of the day!

The Core 2 Duo chips are cool and the stock cooler fan does run quite
quietly. I had my old Athlon silenced completely, so the only audible fan in
my system now is the CPU cooler and it is not really a problem.

What CPU/RAM do you have now in your system - perhaps a RAM upgrade might be
more useful. If your PC could take more memory, you could turn off the
Windows swap file and speed things up a little (or perhaps a lot).

>> The question is as per title : I'm thinking of upgrading my PC and I
>> wondered what is the best liked multiple-chip dual or quad core
>> motherboard at the moment ? I am not a gamer or overclocker but I do
>> develop software and would like high performance.
>>
>> Just to throw another dice amongst the pidgeons, I would prefer
>> something that can have quiet coolers fitted to the CPUs.
>
> I too am a software engineer and I can say my recent upgrade to dual core
> was a waste of time for software development. Visual Studio 2005 doesn't
> make use of both cores during a compile and while my Core 2 Duo is faster
> than my Athlon 2400+, I am disappointed with the improvement - the second
> core just sits around doing tiny windows tasks for most of the day!
>

For anyone interested, I should add that whilst single threaded tasks have
only speeded up slightly, gaming seems much better! However the actualy
improvement is difficult for me to judge because I have also upgraded my
graphics cards by about 4 generations!

(message (Hello 'GT)
(you :wrote n '(Fri, 11 May 2007 11:36:15 +0100))
(

G> I too am a software engineer and I can say my recent upgrade to dual
G> core was a waste of time for software development. Visual Studio 2005
G> doesn't make use of both cores during a compile

it can do that if you compile more than one project (if your solution
contains lots of projects, that happens really frequently).
other build tools can use multiple cores too. you can use Incredibuild for
MSVC builds.

if you use 'make' for builds, you can set 'concurrency' paramters to
parallel build process as much as you wish.

)
(With-best-regards '(Alex Mizrahi) :aka 'killer_storm)
"I am everything you want and I am everything you need")

> G> I too am a software engineer and I can say my recent upgrade to dual
> G> core was a waste of time for software development. Visual Studio 2005
> G> doesn't make use of both cores during a compile
>
> it can do that if you compile more than one project (if your solution
> contains lots of projects, that happens really frequently).
> other build tools can use multiple cores too. you can use Incredibuild for
> MSVC builds.
>
> if you use 'make' for builds, you can set 'concurrency' paramters to
> parallel build process as much as you wish.

I have never heard of Incredibuild before - thanks for the tip. I do
use make though for embedded builds and as you say, it can be used to
give multiple build threads which should make effective use of
multiple processors. I have also found it useful to set the processor
affinity for the debugged task and the IDE to use different CPUs.
This aids responsivity a lot under some circumstances

None of this really answers my question though as I'm still looking
for the answer as to which motherboard and processor combination hits
the current sweet spot in terms of price / performance for multi-chip
multi core ?

Thanks,

Mike