New Motherboards

[Ddrak]

As far as I know you'll either get a dual CPU board, or a dual PCI-E 16x board (although they're actually only 8x when you put 2 cards in, just for some trivia to know). The nForce 4 isn't build for multi-CPU systems and the chipsets that are don't have the dual PCI-E support.

The XBox360 and PS3 won't "smoke the PC" on release though - their nubers are primarily hype (look at any dual-launch title and it looks just as good, if not better on a high end PC). Reality is it's very hard to take advantage of all that parallelism. Similarly, having a 4-way CPU system isn't going to help your gaming much over 2-way or even a single CPU. Games just aren't that effective at using the parallel CPUs.

To quote Jim Allchin from Microsoft, the PC will continue to be the best gaming platform available for the forseeable future.

Dd

[xilanthanax]

I don't feel that consoles will ever out perform a PC until they make a console that will be upgradable, like a PC.

[Ddrak]

That Tyan board isn't NForce4. It's NForce Professional, which is a very different beast. Not only that, it's actually got 2 NForce Pro chips on it and an AMD PCI-X bridge as well.

The reason it's only available in Socket 940 and not 939 is the architecture they are using requires multiple HT links into each CPU. Socket 940 supports 3 16x16 links while socket 939 only supports a single 16x16 link. 940s do have slightly higher performance at the same clock speed because of that, when paired with a mobo that will use it.

Until they start seriously making 64 bit native games, more than 2-3G of memory really isn't going to give any benefits as a single 32 bit process can't address more than that without going into funky tricks. Sure that board is gonna run pretty damn fast though, but I dunno the real perf increase you'll see in a game will be that great over a single Ath-64 in a regular board.

Dd

[Tallas]

http://www.torcinteractive.com/
I played the demo in 64 bit mode and while it was still extremely rough for gameplay, the details were beyond any other game I've played. I toss a grenade into a narrow hallway and duck behind a corner. After the explosion, I go back and see that the grenade blew out the lights, destroyed ceiling tiles, destroyed floor tiles, singed that entire section black, etc. It was cool being able to shoot out lights from across the room, but I don't think it had any effect on the enemies seeing me
Its not a huge download, if you're running x64 give it a shot, although you can run it in 32 bit as well.

[Ddrak]

I know that some 64 bit games exist (I've been playing the 64 bit Far Cry and the visual improvement over the 32 bit version is pretty nice), but on the whole, games are still written to 32 bit and just cross-compiled to 64 bit. Mainstream gaming is still probably 3-5 years from 64 bit pure.

Dd