Is it possible to run 2 different motherboards in parallel? [closed]

I want to run a motherboard with a 64-bit CPU and another motherboard with a 32-bit CPU etc. etc. in parallel to form a kind of "Super PC" for my hard core games.

Question 1

Is it possible in Windows 8.1?

Question 2

If it is possible, how do I go about doing this?

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1 Answer

"Is it possible?" Well, yes, in a sense. It's called having two separate computers. Or, to a lesser degree, virtualization.

The motherboard is what ties all the pieces of a computer together. It hosts system buses, peripheral-hardware interfaces, and so on.

Simplifying a little, today's hardware isn't designed in such a way that it can be shared between multiple, independent systems running on the hardware simultaneously. There existed hardware add-ons for early personal computers, like the Z-80 SoftCard for Apple II or the Sidecar for the Amiga 1000, but these add-ons were basically whole computers of their own which tied into the graphics and storage of the host system. On the Apple II this was easy as it was a single-tasking design, and on the Amiga it took specific programming (not entirely unlike whole-system virtualization today).

So while technically the answer is "yes, with caveats", in practice the answer is "no". You will need to duplicate so many components that you effectively end up with two separate computers, possibly sharing a case (if you have one custom made for your setup). That makes it rather pointless for most people, and thus no market exists so (at least insofar as I know) nobody has spent the time and money to try to do it.

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