Socket 939 holdout - upgrade question

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frappe33

Limp Gawd
Joined
Oct 17, 2005
Messages
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I'm currently running a 3800+ Manchester and I'm getting the itch for some upgrading. But alas, it is a poor man's itch so all I really can consider is a processor upgrade at this time.

Here are my questions for those who would know:

How much real world difference would be seen if I were to go from my current chip to say an Opteron 170, which still is stock a 2.0GHz chip? Stock vs. Stock, would there be a perceptible difference?
Overclocking, I have read everywhere that the Optis are great at stable increases. Anyone with experience OC'ing a Manchester? I have putzed around with the Asus OC utility that came with the A8N-SLI Premium I am on, and easily got it up to the 2.4GHz as reported by the same without issue. For cooling it is sitting under a Zalman 9500 with a 120mm drawing directly off and out the back, so temps shouldn't be an issue.
Any other thoughts on squeezing more out of this 939 box would be appreciated. One last question for users - real world differences dollars for performance using current 939 pricing - is it worth an extra $80 to jump from a Opti 170 @ 2.0GHz to an Opti 180 @ 2.4GHz?
Thanks in advance for anyone's input.
 
Do what i did. Find a GOOD used opty with a good stepping that runs good speeds, etc.! :D
 
I can tell you this, I used to use the same chip in my gaming machine. Bought it of course when the x2 just came out. I have since moved it to my torrent box and but an FX-55 in the gaming machine.

Its like night and day. The FX blows the x2 outta the water and I was able to get 3.0 out of it when my x2 could only get 2.2

The dual core just never quite made it for me. It never materialized to the noticable differences the clockspeeds made.

My suggestion, get something that can give you way higher clockspeeds. See if you can get your hands on maybe an FX55 as well.
 
g33zy said:
I can tell you this, I used to use the same chip in my gaming machine. Bought it of course when the x2 just came out. I have since moved it to my torrent box and but an FX-55 in the gaming machine.

Its like night and day. The FX blows the x2 outta the water and I was able to get 3.0 out of it when my x2 could only get 2.2

The dual core just never quite made it for me. It never materialized to the noticable differences the clockspeeds made.

My suggestion, get something that can give you way higher clockspeeds. See if you can get your hands on maybe an FX55 as well.
Click to expand...

My opty maxs out around 2930 ish and then thats x2 soooo umm yeah. Find a good opty! ;)

PS: I also had a x2 that maxed out around 2400ish with half the cache and this was night and day! =D
 
I had a single core Opty 146 that ran at 2.9GHz and swapped it out for an X2 4400+ that can only hit 2.5GHz, but the difference is pretty significant, in favor of the X2 that is. I had moved the 146 into a secondary machine, but I was so use to the X2's responsiveness that it wasn't long before I swapped out the 146 yet again for an X2 in that machine. True, there were SOME things that the 146 did better, specifically games. But even that changed before long with games that were multithreaded and patches for existing games that added support for dual cores. Then came the Vista upgrade with pretty much put the last nail in the 146's coffin as Vista runs a lot better on multicores.
 
I upgraded from a 3500 to a opty 185 and loved the difference! My new 185 running 13x250 at default volts on air and just too busy to see how much further it can go. I know that thing could easily go a bit higher also.
 
EDITTED

TBH, if you are on a budget I would OC what you have now. The chances of finding a good opteron for cheap will be pretty slim. Opterons also run a little bit hotter -- keep that i mind. Some opty's clock badly, so more volts coupled with already warm operation means a hotter chip alround. I also doubt any of the good steppings will go on the cheap, even second hand. Also, the 939 market pretty much dead. If your mobo or Ram dies, you will have a hard time finding anything decent to help you clock that chip. I'd rather start saving for my next platform upgrade, than put money into a dead socket.
 
I don't know about the rest of you and how you get your info but AMD is about drop Opteron CPU pricing 10 - 50% on June 5th... Same day as the Tech Tour here in Toronto.

So I'd wait and see what happens next week.
 
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