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Comment by hnlmorg | Hacker News Reader

> There was a brief moment where Intel Celerons didn't really prevent you from using them in a dual CPU setup, so I had two 366mhz Celerons overclocked to ~433mhz

Was that the BP6 motherboard from Abit?

I had that board, those processors and used to overclock them too.

Also ran Linux and BeOS on it (though IIRC you had to patch BeOS for SMP support).

Quake 3 ran so smooth on that machine, even without Q3s experimental SMP support enabled.

That was actually my all time favourite computer, even to this day.

I also had a TNT2 in an earlier machine, but the BP6 machine had a GeForce 3.

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Dual 300As overclocked to just over 500Mhz each on a BP6 with Geforce 256 here too! Fastest, smoothest machine I ever used until the M1 MacBook. Quake 3 multiplayer demo ran so fast it gave me motion sickness ^^ Years later I "upgraded" to a 1Ghz Athlon and it felt like a downgrade a lot of the time.

> though IIRC you had to patch BeOS for SMP support

The board might have require a driver or patch, but SMP was BeOS's entire reason for being! The drawing of each window on the screen ran in a separate thread. It was their main selling point.

Reading the BeOS Bible talking about that is quite a throwback:

> As described elsewhere in this book, BeOS uses multiple processors with incredible efficiency. If you'll be running BeOS most of the time, you'll get more bang for your buck by getting two (or more) older processors than by installing one superfast CPU. Last year's 266 MHz CPUs will always be dirt cheap compared to today's 450 MHz CPU. Thus, when running BeOS, you could have 532 MHz for less than the cost of a single 450 MHz processor. The catch is that if you'll be dual-booting into operating systems that won't recognize a second CPU (such as Windows 95/98), you'll end up with half of your processor speed being wasted until you reboot into BeOS. Chance are that once you start using BeOS regularly, you won't want to use anything else, and you won't regret buying a multiprocessor machine.

https://birdhouse.org/beos/bible/bos/ch_hardware1.html

Lack of SMP was an artificial limitation for the BeOS 5 Personal Edition (I think it was called). The idea being you’d get BeOS for free but you couldn’t use it as a proper multiprocessor workstation without paying for a license.

This was also the same BeOS release that targeted Intel and ran off a virtual disk stored on a Windows FAT32 partition.

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