CPU upgrade question

[antishatter]

I am currently running the following

Asus K8n-dl
3 gig ddr 400 ecc registered ram (corsair)
nvidia geforce 6800xt
2x 842 amd opterons (engineering samples I won at some random lan party)

I recently ran into some issues with this setup. I was getting random reboots and general bizarre behavior but I tested the ram, and even bought more ram so that I could test my current stuff, it was not the ram (not a big deal because I was planning on upgrading anyway). Anyway I was able to run the box fine on 1 cpu but if I tried to put cpu number 2 into the primary slot I was greeted with the friendly asus cpu failure audio alert. Needless to say one of my cpus is dead. I need to replace it. I can replace the chip fairly cheaply or I can upgrade. There are several different ways I can go with this upgrade.

1. I can buy two AMD Dual-Core Opteron 270 Italy 2.0GHz (quad core :drool: )
2. I can simply replace the chip that is dead.
3. I can go with a single AMD x2 ( I would need suggestions as I have not really been following these very closely)

Lets assume that I have about $500 (I could probably dig up more if some uber good option arrises) to spend on the cpus. What do you guys suggest? Would 2 dual core chips actually be utilized in gaming? or would it be pointless as they are starting to gear more of the games toward dual core and I would get little or no advantage out of them. I could also get an Athlon x2 and just run that,if I get a higher end model I would probably get better performance then my dual 842's. Anyway I just wanted to know what you guys thought.

 

[WintersFury]

Well a x2 at a higher clock speed would be faster currently. However having 4 cores would be better as games start taking advantage of it as they are now starting to do. I think to be Windows Certified a program / game has to support multithreading or at least Vista certified.

So having 4 cores wouldn't be a bad idea. Or just replacing the cpu. As well if you went to a x2 you'd have to get a new board, cpu and memory unless you went 939 (Which is hard to find good new boards and cpu's for).