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I want to make it clear again that Windows 95/98/ME do not support more than one processor. If you are using one of these OSes and can’t afford to purchase Windows 2000 (or don’t feel comfortable using Linux or the BeOS), a dual CPU motherboard like the D3VA is not for you – regardless of how much you want one. Don’t get your hopes up that Windows 95/98/ME installs and runs fine because it is only making use of one CPU – the other one just sits wasted.

The D3VA performed very well in various stability tests, so I am left to conclude that this board is quite stable. It ran rock steady through 12 hours of 3D-Mark 2000, effortlessly grilled through my Winrar endurance test, and it didn’t crash once during my entire time with it. That isn’t to say that this motherboard has no weaknesses – because every board does – I was lucky enough not to find one.

If you’ve seen any SMP benchmarks before, you’ll know that having two CPUs doesn’t do much in the way of improving gaming performance – in some cases, having two CPUs can actually decrease performance. This has a lot to do with the fact that the consumer versions of Windows (95/98/ME) don’t support SMP and that the business versions of Windows that do support SMP (NT4/2000) are poor gaming performers.

Workstations and servers, on the other hand, make much better use of two processors. These machines gain a lot of power from being able to not only do more at one time, but also by being able to complete certain tasks much faster. For programs that don’t support SMP, the benefits of two CPUs are revealed through greatly improved multitasking. Even though the programs themselves aren’t "smart" enough to use both CPUs, the OS is, and it divides up the workload between the two. As you’ll see in the benchmarks below, this divvying works quite well. For programs that do support SMP, like Adobe Photoshop, the benefits are appealing in a more immediate way: by making use of multi-threading, Photoshop can harness the power of both CPUs at one time, allowing it to complete operations much faster.

The onboard RAID sweetens the pot even more (for an explanation of RAID, see Richard Harris’ IDE RAID Card Roundup). ATA100 devices don’t boast the high performance that SCSI ones do, but when price is paramount, IDE is definitely the interface du jour. With a hard drive running the OS on the main IDE channel, and a RAID or two running on the HPT370’s IDE channels, the D3VA will hum along just fine. A SCSI controller can be added later on down the road if the need arises.