My Socket 939 Toy

CapnCrunch53

CapnCrunch53

Weaksauce
Joined
Mar 17, 2009
Messages
103
Thought you guys might enjoy this, I recently built this machine for fun and because I always have had a thing for the Socket 939 era, despite never having owned one until now. It's quite a fun little rig to play with; it took 2.4GHz (from 2.0GHz stock) right off the bat with stock vcore, and rather than bump the voltage and try to hit 2.6 or 2.8, I decided to go the other direction. Stock vcore is 1.350v (setting in BIOS); right now I'm sitting at 1.300v, which actually ends up being about 1.296v after vdroop according to CPU-Z. I'm not really fussed with running Prime95 for hours to ensure total stability, as this is a fun machine for me to play with, as well as a spare gaming rig for lans; if something gets corrupted I can always tweak settings and reinstall. That being said, I played through an entire Left4Dead campaign with my buddy and the thing was rock solid. According to CoreTemp it idles around 35C and got up to 49C during that gameplay session. It's really a capable little machine; I turned off AA and AS and set everything to medium and most of the time was above 70fps at 1680x1050; not too bad for such an old little guy.

Sovereign:
Athlon 64 X2 3800+ Manchester @ 2.4GHz, 1.275V
Arctic Cooling Freezer Pro (not sure which model it is, ie 7 or 64, the fan has been replaced on it)
Biostar Nforce4 SLI
2x1GB Patriot PC3200 @ 2-3-2-5-1T
EVGA GeForce 9600GSO 384MB
Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS
500GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.10
Lite-On ATA DVD Combo Drive
Corsair TX-650
Lian Li PC-65B
Scythe Kazemaster Fan Controller
Windows XP x64 Pro SP2

CPU-Z Link

I think I'm gonna see just how far I can undervolt it while maintaining this overclock, and then if I get bored of that maybe I'll see how fast I can get it with a small voltage bump. Really happy with this machine overall :D Here's a crappy pic of the guts; don't mind the Core 2 or Zalman stickers, they lie (leftover from when my Core 2 system was in this case obviously).

 
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That picture is too small to see unless your computer is running a 40x30 resolution.
 
Nice, 939 was the best choice until Intel Core came along.

Integrated memory controller and 64 Bit instructions for the win :)
 
Overclocking on old school hardware is so much fun compared to the new stuff. I remember getting a Venice core A64 3200+ just shy bit over 3.8ghz with a custom pot running at -50ish 'C with Dice on a old school Abit board think it was. Man those were the day's.

Indeed, it was during this time that AMD was in the lead in terms of raw processing power besting all the P4/D crap Intel was pumping out at the time, till Intel decided to use secrets of the Pentium M (based on P3) architecture for their C2D line, I remember reading some articles with Intel mid range C2D (think it was the E6400) besting AMD's top of the line FX chip in most of the applications the benchmarks were pitched against.
 
put a cheap Opteron 175 or 180 from ebay in it and you'll like it even more. People have been making key chains out of them because they can't get rid of em.
 
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Neat little build! I've been trying to find one of the socket 939 Sapphire Pure White boards for a while now. Get rid of that C2D sticker!
 
Sorry, you could click the small thumbnail to view a bigger image, but I just changed it to a bigger version.

I've gotten down to 1.250v so far, still seemingly stable. Found a neat old forum post in which a guy posted his results undervolting a ton of different processors; from his results it looks like 1.225v or 1.250v will likely be the lowest I can do. Link

SBSuperfly said:
put a cheap Opteron 175 or 180 from ebay in it and you'll like it even more. People have been making key chains out of them because they can't get rid of em.
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I might do that at some point; I'd kinda like to do a sister build sometime with a DFI Lanparty and an Opteron; always loved the look of those boards.

LigTasm said:
Neat little build! I've been trying to find one of the socket 939 Sapphire Pure White boards for a while now. Get rid of that C2D sticker!
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Haha I will. And that's a sweet looking motherboard; when I was looking for KT333 boards for my Voodoo5 system I discovered that there was a Soyo Dragon board that had a similar white color scheme.
 
I once had the setup of choice of a DFI LanParty Ultra SLi with a Opteron 180 CPU and two 7900GTXs.

Broke it up and sold it all off for a small fortune at the end of 2009. Funded a whole new machine.

Kind of the last time I was at the peak so to speak.
 
I'm planning a similar build, but I'll be using an Asrock 939Dual-VSTA. With PCI-E x16 and AGP 8x and the ability to use the AM2CPU board to add in an AM2 cpu, I'm going to have tons of fun tinkering with this thing. :D
 
CompuG##K said:
I'm planning a similar build, but I'll be using an Asrock 939Dual-VSTA. With PCI-E x16 and AGP 8x and the ability to use the AM2CPU board to add in an AM2 cpu, I'm going to have tons of fun tinkering with this thing. :D
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Oh man those are cool as hell! I'd like to play around with one of those someday too. Too many 939 builds! I'm actually working on another 939 build at the moment, I've been slowly gathering parts for it for a year and a half, and I just had a big breakthrough finding the perfect case for it. I'll probably post it in this thread when I get it finished, but it's basically a replica of a super expensive Velocity Micro boutique computer that a friend of mine was given by his dad ages ago. Would have cost between 4 and 5 thousand when new :eek: And of course the kid never really appreciated it, and would just upgrade it and throw away the old parts, which made me sad. I helped him work on it a lot though, and even though by that time it was at least 3 years old and "a piece of crap" according to him, I still really liked it for how high-end it was in its day.
 
wow that brings back some good memories:) i had one of the infamous opteron 165's. it was just incredible. stock HSF and it went from 1.8Ghz to 2.4....undervolted! then i got some watercooling parts....built my own cpu block for fun and bam rockin the 3.0Ghz in no time. took off that pesky heat spreader too, great mod :)

and then came the sad day when i had to flush out my water loop...you see that block i made had a major flaw. drill bit tips broke off inside it, couldn't get them out. rust through the whole loop. i was a dumbass and spill water on the mobo whilst flushing it out.....and for some reason i figured it was a good idea to turn it on - without letting it dry.

by then you couldn't get a s939 mobo anywhere unless it was used or you spent 3x what it was worth...RIP opty, i may have abused you but only because i loved you.
 
CompuG##K said:
I'm planning a similar build, but I'll be using an Asrock 939Dual-VSTA. With PCI-E x16 and AGP 8x and the ability to use the AM2CPU board to add in an AM2 cpu, I'm going to have tons of fun tinkering with this thing. :D
Click to expand...

I used that board and the AM2 upgrade. It was actually pretty damn sweet.
 
I decided to run Prime95 on it for a bit, and one of the threads got an error after somewhere around 10 minutes. So I went back up to 1.275v and ran it for a bit over an hour with no errors. I figure that's good enough for what that machine will be used for, which is just a spare gaming rig and to mess around with.
 
Ah, memories. I went all out with 939. Got an X2 4400+, 7800 GTX, and ended up with a whopping 4 GB of RAM paired up with a 150 GB Raptor. Sadly, I got a bit of a bum chip that wouldn't do much better than 2.6GHz. When the C2Ds came along though, I went with an E6600 and that would overclock to 3.3GHz without issue, though I typically kept it at stock. 939 will always hold a special place for being a great many firsts on my part. But, what I really remember is that in 2006, before I got the C2D, I paired up that 4400+ with my 8800 GTX and that survived all the way through to my Q6600.
 
THRESHIN said:
wow that brings back some good memories:) i had one of the infamous opteron 165's. it was just incredible. stock HSF and it went from 1.8Ghz to 2.4....undervolted! then i got some watercooling parts....built my own cpu block for fun and bam rockin the 3.0Ghz in no time. took off that pesky heat spreader too, great mod :)

and then came the sad day when i had to flush out my water loop...you see that block i made had a major flaw. drill bit tips broke off inside it, couldn't get them out. rust through the whole loop. i was a dumbass and spill water on the mobo whilst flushing it out.....and for some reason i figured it was a good idea to turn it on - without letting it dry.

by then you couldn't get a s939 mobo anywhere unless it was used or you spent 3x what it was worth...RIP opty, i may have abused you but only because i loved you.
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That's a really great story. Sounds like that old Opty served you well... a moment of silence. Those Opty 165/70/75/80 chips seem to be legendary. I just bought a 165 from someone on here yesterday, probably won't do anything with it for a couple months until I can afford to spend a bit more cash, but I'm thinking a sister build to the 3800+X2 but focused completely on overclocking. I've got a 7800GTX to pair with it to start with, but I'd like to get one of the crossfire Lanparty boards and a pair of X1900XTs to run in it, because for some reason I don't have any Radeons from that era in my collection yet.

blitzkommando said:
Ah, memories. I went all out with 939. Got an X2 4400+, 7800 GTX, and ended up with a whopping 4 GB of RAM paired up with a 150 GB Raptor. Sadly, I got a bit of a bum chip that wouldn't do much better than 2.6GHz. When the C2Ds came along though, I went with an E6600 and that would overclock to 3.3GHz without issue, though I typically kept it at stock. 939 will always hold a special place for being a great many firsts on my part. But, what I really remember is that in 2006, before I got the C2D, I paired up that 4400+ with my 8800 GTX and that survived all the way through to my Q6600.
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Nice, it's amazing how long a useful life the A64 X2s had considering how old the A64 architecture is. Honestly in my opinion they're still totally viable for non-gaming, non-production work, especially AM2 ones. Hell I used my 5200+ Windsor rig as my main for a few weeks over winter break while I completely overhauled the watercooling on my Phenom II and honestly it never bothered me. Great chips.

edit: cash, not cache. You can tell where my mind is :D
 
Glad that thing is working out for you so well. :D The board was not a big seller for some reason but it should have been. It will match the DFI lanparty as far as abilities and maybe even more.

I know for a fact that it will do 270FSB with better cooling on NB. I wish I would have found an FX to stick in it to see how far it would go. Cheers !

Edit: forgot to mention I used some decent ram @ 270. I stumbled on some samsung sticks that were amazing.
 
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Yeah honestly I'm really impressed with this board; especially considering it's a Biostar (nothing against them but they're usually pretty barebones). Stable as hell so far, and the overclocking options on it are great. Also, (for those that don't know) this board has an awesome feature in the BIOS that lets you save a ton of CMOS configurations (I'm not sure how many slots it has; I got bored of scrolling at 20-something), and even has a space for you to write comments for each one, ie "Stock clock" or "240*10, 1.275v". I've seen motherboards with 2 or sometimes 4 configuration slots but never one this extensive, and never one with comments. Really neat IMO.

I ordered a 5cfm fan to slap on that NB heatsink, so I'll have to give it another go and see what I can push out of her :D
 
CapnCrunch53 said:
I might do that at some point; I'd kinda like to do a sister build sometime with a DFI Lanparty and an Opteron; always loved the look of those boards.
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Kind of crazy, as I actually just picked up this exact combo. LanParty Ultra SLi and an Opty 175. :p

Putting a pair of ole BFG factory OC'd, factory watercooled 8800GTX's on that puppy.
Should be a lot of fun.

And by the way Capn, you aren't the CapnCrunch from the old HardwareLogic site are ya? :D
 
jbltecnicspro said:
20-something CMOS configurations? And you weren't at the limit? Holy...
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Yeah I know, its a little bit ridiculous. Super useful feature though.

stinger608 said:
Kind of crazy, as I actually just picked up this exact combo. LanParty Ultra SLi and an Opty 175. :p

Putting a pair of ole BFG factory OC'd, factory watercooled 8800GTX's on that puppy.
Should be a lot of fun.
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Now that should be a fun setup :D I just grabbed a boxed Lanparty CFX3200-DR for $23 shipped on Ebay; I'm not sure how that happened since Lanparty boards (especially the 939 ones) usually hold their value really well on Ebay, but for some reason nobody else bid on it, so I'm not complaining.

stinger608 said:
And by the way Capn, you aren't the CapnCrunch from the old HardwareLogic site are ya? :D
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Nope, must be another Capn.
 
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