Can I use a Quad Socket Motherboard for Gaming

[bossgunner]

Before I start, if quad socket motherboards aren't sold, just type fish as an answer. I found out that dual socket motherboards only support intel xeon. Now, I just found out about quad socket. Listen, intel xeon <3 servers right? Sucks for gaming right? Wrong. So before I ask the question, pretend you're in a world where intel xeon is as good as core i7. Ok here we go.

What family of motherboards can go in a quad socket?

(Pretend it's all free to acquire) Could it be used for gaming?

What limits are put on a Quad Socket motherboard, as in, certain parts not working?

 

[little_me]

Red herring.

Xeon is basically I7 without integrated gpu, bit more cache and not made overclockable to name major differences.

As far as I am aware, quad socket motherboards are not made/sold. One of the reasons might be that the physical size on ATX board runs out.
Yes, servers, custom form factor is a possibility.
What benefits would it give? more processor cores.
How would it help gaming? you can already get what? 8 or 12 core processors with hyperthreading, giving you FAR more power than any game can use. (not that most can even max out 4 cores)
Big chunk of problem in gaming is simply graphics, which you cannot help with 2nd or 3rd or 4th physical processor since existing ones can already do it.

Yes, some server boards also have 16 dimm slots, allowing you to have stupid amounts of ram. This is the only benefit you might get from said boards. But if money is not an issue, you can get almost stupid amounts of ram on normal boards too.

 

[bossgunner]

Red herring quad socket does exist, but I don't now how to obtain one. I don't care about overclocking, I won't do that. If an item was made to run at a certain speed, I'll leave it at that. And I've seen a dual-cpu motherboard for gaming. So, mulitple CPUS would give an advantage, because the dual-cpu with the xeon cpus were amazing. Actually had the highest score on those things with a camera moving around a game world.

 

[GhislainG]

http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon/C600/X10QBL-4.cfm should be a good start. Supermicro can tell you where you can buy them.

 

[kanewolf]

There are plenty of quad socket servers made. HP, Dell, SGI all have quad socket and greater servers. Xeon and Opteron are both available in quad socket compatible configurations.

Would you use one for a gaming PC, no. The dozens of cores would be sitting idle because very little software can scale beyond 8 threads. Carefully written HPC (high performance computing) software will scale from a dozen to around 100 threads. It becomes VERY difficult to keep dozens of threads active because you can't get data in and out of the host fast enough. So then you end up using lots of ram for I/O buffering of some kind (async, double buffer, etc).

 

[bossgunner]

So, kane what you're saying is, it takes more money/has more requirements to keep a quad socket motherboard gaming pc running good for gaming? Or is it more like it just plain sucks more than dual-cpu, which IS better than single cpu from what I've seen. And is supermicro the only quad socket motherboard manufacturer?

 

[little_me]

Highest score, maybe... but by how much? how many thousands are you going to sink into it to get that tiny fraction more oomph?
As noted, supermicro seems to be one of the few building quad cpu boards.
And this seems to build systems with them.
https://www.pugetsystems.com/nav/peak/quad_xeon/customize.php

Bear in mind, said toys are expensive and seems to start at 16,000 or so on cheapest options. (no sli, so to get to the top you'd need to invest lot more.)

Also bear in mind that while windows professional supports up to two physical CPU's, it wont support 4, you'll need datacenter instead which is totally different beast. (and is not even planned for running games, will they even run?)

so.. yes, quad cpu thing is a red herring and you can 99% of time build a better gaming machine, cheaper, using only single CPU.

 

[GhislainG]

So, kane what you're saying is, it takes more money/has more requirements to keep a quad socket motherboard gaming pc running good for gaming? Or is it more like it just plain sucks more than dual-cpu, which IS better than single cpu from what I've seen. And is supermicro the only quad socket motherboard manufacturer?

Supermicro is the only manufacturer with a large variety of motherboards; you can also check Tyan, but I haven't found one that would be appropriate for gaming (none or not enough PCI-E 3.0 x16/x8 slots.