[geeks] fastest AMD socket 939 and 940 processors

[Shannon Hendrix]

On Mar 12, 2009, at 09:20 , Lionel Peterson wrote:

>   Mar 11, 2009 08:37:02 PM, geeks at sunhelp.org wrote:
>> I have been thinking of building a new Wintendo, but there are so
>> many choices now, all far faster than what I have, I've not really
>> gotten a handle on it yet.
>   The Intel choices are so fast & cheap, it's hard to go wrong. You  
> can
>   get a very decent Intel Core 2 Duo CPU w/stock cooler for well under
>   $100 ($80?), quad Core 2 Duos are well under $200 ($180?), and very
>   respectable Intel MBs for just under $100 with very, very, capable
>   integrated video, some with DVI or HDMI outputs.

I have not been impressed with Core 2 as an Opteron upgrade.  I tried  
a couple of Core 2 systems that on paper should blow my Opteron away,  
but they didn't.

Since this *IS* a Wintendo, I tested with some games, and was  
disappointed in the Intel machines.  In some cases, things ran  
slower.  I was told at the time it was because AMD's central bus was  
still a lot better, and DDR2 really wasn't much better than the  
Opteron's memory system.

Of course, that was 6 months ago, and I didn't really have time to  
investigate very much, so I just punted and decided to wait.  I might  
have chosen a bad system to demo on, I don't really know.  The specs  
looked good at the time.

Now we have Phenom and I7 available, and I was thinking that since I  
like to keep a machine configuration at least 3 years, maybe I should  
push for one of those.

The things driving the upgrade are speed for VMware, games, and some  
media work.

For everything else, even this old machine is overkill.



-- 
Shannon Hendrix
shannon at widomaker.com