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PCI Express Socket 939 Mobos Anytime Soon?

M

mdk30

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Mar 29, 2004
Messages
1,028
I'm going to be building two new computers sometime this fall, one for myself and the other for my brother so we can play Doom 3 and HL2 the way they were meant to be played. Anyway, I'm only really waiting for one thing at this point, PCI Express motherboards for the socket 939 platform. Once these two computers are built, neither one of us will be upgrading for QUITE some time, but I want to have PCI Express for a possible next generation video card upgrade a ways down the road. I've been trying to find information on when socket 939 mobos with PCI Express will be hitting retail, but haven't found anything yet. Has anyone heard anything on this subject in a while? I'm getting kind of impatient because Doom 3 is already out, HL2 is right around the corner, I know what I want to get, but its just not out yet! Anyway, let me know if you've heard/read anything about this, I'd be quite interested. Thanks. :)
 
Xrave said:
4th quarter this year.
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Is that on an AMD roadmap anywhere? Just wondering because I looked on their site and couldn't find anything.
 
It's not an AMD related time table...it's up to chipset manufacturers to support that feature and motherboard manufacturers to build it.

It's just been mentioned by motherboard companies as an aprox date of when their motherbards will be available.
 
XXX-OWNEDBYME-XXX said:
newegg already has 939 with pci express on them but their barely any video cards to go on pci
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"That's a lie! Harry Bailey went to war! He got the Congressional medal of honor, he saved the lives of every man on that transport!"

There are currently only 3 socket 939 motherboards on Newegg and NONE of them have PCI Express, they're all AGP 8X.
 
XXX-OWNEDBYME-XXX said:
newegg already has 939 with pci express on them but their barely any video cards to go on pci
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Which motherboard for a 939 socket has PCI express? No motherboards that I know of are available for purchase at this time.
 
There was a pic floating around of an Abit NF4 board with PCI-E. IIRC it was from Akiba (where else?). Anyway, I think it was said to be expected Q4, say October or so. Considering there's ONE NF3 939 board out now, let's hope NF4 boards hit with better availability right off the bat.


Tom
 
hemi said:
There was a pic floating around of an Abit NF4 board with PCI-E. IIRC it was from Akiba (where else?). Anyway, I think it was said to be expected Q4, say October or so. Considering there's ONE NF3 939 board out now, let's hope NF4 boards hit with better availability right off the bat.


Tom
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You hear that Nvidia and VIA?!? Give us our PCI Express Socket 939 mobos dammit... NOW!
 
I wonder if the 939 was rushed to counter the 915/925 set from Intel? Now the mobo manufactures have to clear some inventory of these impotent 939 boards before they give us the full meal deal: 939 with PCI Express.

I wonder how the Holiday shopping season will effect the push to PCI Express if anything. The more PCI Express video cards are available, the more people are going to notice. Long shot I know.

Upon further thought, how about this:
Holiday season used to clear out the current generation of mobo's, most Intel since that's the prominent oem sold crap. New year brings all 915/925 which really leaves AMD in the dust. Ok.. thinking too much about this. Darn it I don't want to replace my mobo in a year if I go the 939 route this month. :(

I'm assuming if I bought a 939 board now w/o PCI Express, I'll be able to get a new board in 6 months and swap out my cpu (if I went that route). :eek:
 
EricDawg- I'm in the exact same boat as you!

I've been waiting for a 939/PCI-E combo since May. Q4? Damn! :mad: Now I'm seriously considering buying an 8x AGP/939 mobo and just replacing the mobo once ATi stops making high-end AGP GPU's. I'll keep waiting for PCI-E/939 mobos for the time being, but once Half-Life 2 goes gold (most likely at the end of August/Early Sept) I'm just going to get whatever the top of the line system is, PCI-E or not.

So...is replacing a mobo difficult? There is just no way I'm waiting til November to play Half-Life 2 and Doom 3.
 
I've been ready to buy since May but waited for PCI Express on the 939 boards after reading a review somewhere saying 939 would ship with PCI Express very soon. This is my first build in 10 yrs. and I'm not too eager to have to redo the whole mobo install again in a year or so. Reading some of these posts here indicates the new mobo's are buggy.

I'd at least like be sure that the 939 cpu I'd put in today would work just fine in the PCI Express boards when the come out. I don't know why they wouldn't, but surprise surprise, info on the 939 PCI Express boards is pretty hard to come by. Guess they don't want us to stop buying them right now. :rolleyes:

Seriously, if I knew that for sure I'd probably go for it now. By the time the need for a PCI Express video card arives, we'll probably need a new CPU anyways. :eek:


It's getting harder and harder to wait since I'm playing on my work Thinkpad (1.5 M, 7500 Radeon) so I'm very limited in what I can play. Never played Half-Life! I'm so lame.

Well at least I'm not the only one with a wallet burning a whole in my pocket!
 
Even if PCI-E did come out for 939/754 next month, or even in november .... it would still be the first revision, and no guarantees on a performance boost over AGP8X or that itll work properly, they 'revised' 'v2's' dont be out for months later, maybe january, or late december. Even if you went for a 3.6GHZ intel LGA775 right now and magically found a PCI-E 6800UE .... it would still be within 5 fps of its AGP brother.
 
The reason I am waiting is for nForce4. The Potential Upgradeablitiy of this board far outweighs any lack of signifigant performance boost. DDR2 support, PCI-e , and the 939 chip set. (Its highly likely that AMD's new 90nm process and dual core tech will be 939 compatable)

For me, as a novice, I want somthing that I know I'll be able to upgrade easily. This isalso my first build ever so I'm willing to wait. I also think that because the nForce4 board will be ' NVIDIA's preferred mobo for its 6800 ' that it will have gone through the gamut of pre-release debugging etc. But that is just a novice talking so don't flame me :D :D
 
Dillusion said:
Even if PCI-E did come out for 939/754 next month, or even in november .... it would still be the first revision, and no guarantees on a performance boost over AGP8X or that itll work properly, they 'revised' 'v2's' dont be out for months later, maybe january, or late december. Even if you went for a 3.6GHZ intel LGA775 right now and magically found a PCI-E 6800UE .... it would still be within 5 fps of its AGP brother.
Click to expand...

I'm waiting not for the performance boost of the PCIe slot, but just because in the future, video cards will be PCIe only.
 
Is there a strong possibility that the next wave of graphics cards will only come in PCI-Express?
 
There will still be AGP variants for about a year.
 
I want to buld a 2nd rig with a new 939 strictly for gaming, and I too am waiting for a 939 board that is a bit more future proof. I hate waiting :(
 
So would you guys suggest that I go for a nice Socket 939 board, Atlon64 3800+ and a 6800 GT or Ultra now (once I find one) and upgrade once the revision 2's are out, or wait and get one of the PCI-e 939's along with an FX-53 or FX-55 and a PCI-e vid card? Right now i've got an MSI 6380e, XP 1800+, and Radeon 9600 XT.
 
Gen.Viper said:
So would you guys suggest that I go for a nice Socket 939 board, Atlon64 3800+ and a 6800 GT or Ultra now (once I find one) and upgrade once the revision 2's are out, or wait and get one of the PCI-e 939's along with an FX-53 or FX-55 and a PCI-e vid card? Right now i've got an MSI 6380e, XP 1800+, and Radeon 9600 XT.
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It depends on how patient you are. If you cannot wait til around November to upgrade, then you may consider going with what is currently available. PCI-E offers no performance difference over AGP; the most salient reason for upgrading to a board that supports 939 as well as PCI-E is to futureproof your system.
 
PCI-Express does start off at 16x speed, but that doesn't mean it is twice as fast as its AGP brother. Look up some benchmarks and you'll see that there is no difference. In many cases, actually, the AGP X800 XT Platinum Edition beats the highest PCI-E card out there (that is, the X800 XT Non-Platinum).
 
So PCI Express 939 mobo's out in November maybe?! Hmm... just far enough out to make me cry. Shoot... maybe I just go for it now and a year from now give my brother his first PC. An AMD 64 FX-53. Nah.... I'll just give him the old motherboard. :cool:

I guess if I waited another month college football would keep me distracted until November. Sigh. :(

Thanks everyone for your advice. Great forums!
 
I was going to wait for PCI-e, but I haven't heard anything about upcoming soundcards.. What's the point of going PCI-e for a video card that won't be any faster and having to settle for onboard sound for probably a year, maybe more.
 
I'm building my first system from scratch and have decided to go the AMD route. If I already had a AGP board I would probably go with what is available but since I have to invest in a Vid card now, I'll wait for PCIe. In the mean time I'm buying a case and watercooling equipment modding the case, getting a power supply, disk drives, optical drives, there's lots of things to occupy my time while I wait for Q4. I'd like to know for sure if the nForce4 chipset will support DDR2, I could start looking for deals on ram too while I'm waiting. The PCIe Vid cards aren't really available now, so waiting isn't such a big deal. Got to go the 939 socket route, I've heard that when AMD introduces the dual core chips they will use socket 939. Intels will use the LGA775 socket. I've heard Intels, "Smithfield" dual core proc will be out mid 2005, haven't heard much about AMD's.
 
Being in a similar position upgrade position, I have decided to drop $400 on a new 6800GT so I can still play games while I am waiting for 939 + pcie.

Keep in mind that even if the first of the mobos come out relatively soon, they will be buggy and offer small performance advantages, not to mention the scarce availability of high-end pcie graphics cards.

I like the peace of mind of doing something now so things don't suck while I wait for the new stuff :p
 
Personally if I was any of you guys I probably wouldnt wait. Go out a buy a decent 939 motherboard... use it for a solid 12-18 months (hey lets face it.. there isnt a graphics card that pushes the limitations of AGP even into the $500 range).

After a solid block of time, if your heart desires go out and buy a PCI express board, by this time the bugs will be ironed out, and there may actually be cards that benefit being on the PCI-X bus. The cards that will break that barrier at that point will probably not be cheap either... so whats another $130 when your spending $400-500 on a new top of the line geforce 8800 1gig DDR5
 
PCI-X is some old thing for servers. Dont know if there is a standard acronym yet but PCI-e is often used and seems more reasonable.

I'm trying to wait myself. I have to anyway because where is the 6800GT or x800XT:np.... a ways off. There is one other benefit here of waiting... Socket 939 chips rated less than 3500+ are due out in Q4. Waiting isnt always smart because something better always comes along....but Im kind of priced out of the 939 platform right now. Im not waiting for anything "better" just the ability to leave newegg with my shorts still on (3300+ or whatever) and also need to justify a $400 graphics card (the ability to continute usind it via pci-e).

Although, hey... Im sure you wouldnt be too hard pressed to sell a 6800GT for a moderate loss should these boards come out soon.
 
Jozone said:
Personally if I was any of you guys I probably wouldnt wait. Go out a buy a decent 939 motherboard... use it for a solid 12-18 months (hey lets face it.. there isnt a graphics card that pushes the limitations of AGP even into the $500 range).

After a solid block of time, if your heart desires go out and buy a PCI express board, by this time the bugs will be ironed out, and there may actually be cards that benefit being on the PCI-X bus. The cards that will break that barrier at that point will probably not be cheap either... so whats another $130 when your spending $400-500 on a new top of the line geforce 8800 1gig DDR5
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Yeah, I was thinking that too. Is replacing a mobo easy?
 
saltycrackers said:
Yeah, I was thinking that too. Is replacing a mobo easy?
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Probably a 30 minute process if you take your time/are reading the manual. Although once you've done it, it becomes second nature like any other upgrade
:p
 
saltycrackers said:
Yeah, I was thinking that too. Is replacing a mobo easy?
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Yeah but there might be DDR II out then requiring new ram perchase as well.... its a damned if you do damned if you dont... you cant keep up or future proof any system. Keep in mind that maybe in the next year or two pci-e 32x slots might be out... who knows... maybe a 32x, 16x SLI combination by then or 2 16x SLI
 
if DDRII is out for the A64, I think that will also require a CPU upgrade as well
 
I am waiting as well.

I would like an AMD 939 that supports:
2xPCIe 16x
S-ATAII
DDR2

That would be my dream!
I guess I will have to wait for Santa though :(
 
TCD said:
if DDRII is out for the A64, I think that will also require a CPU upgrade as well
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Yes, it certainly will since the memory controller is integrated.

The A64 doesn't even need the bandwidth of DDR2 now anyway. If you guys haven't noticed, dual channel offers very little (sometimes zero) performance improvement over single channel 754 systems. DDR2 latencies would just waste cycles for that unnecessary bandwidth. Again, PCI-E isn't necessary either until cards will actually take advantage of it. By the time they do, you will probably have upgraded at least once, maybe twice, and in some cases 3+ times. Don't try and "future proof" your system. It's practically impossible, even for the short term.


Tom
 
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