dual opterons or the fx

[ForceFedFlesh]

im planning on building my next gaming computer in the next month or so, but i cant decide on wat CPU i should get. i have decided between dual opterons or a fx-60. i no the fx's are known for thier gaming power and the opterons are good for their use in servers.

[ack ack]

for a solid build it would probably be easiest to go with the fx-60. from what i've read it's living up to its benchmarks and it packs the best single chip performance to date.

I have heard of a lot of people taking advantage of a dual opteron setup, especially sine the single core 100 and 200 series chip have come down in price. The new opteron dual cores are impressive as well, and a quad core solution would be beautiful for a gaming/web/media streaming server. Though, as always it boils down to price; the cost of two dual core opterons plus ECC ram would be hefty, and the fx-60 pack plenty of power into a single chip at relatively half the cost.

Personally, I'd wait. The fx-60 is the final champion of the 939 socket series. I'd wait 2 year for AMD to implement their DDR3 memory architecture, and by that time the new socket series will have matured for opteron and A64 offering greater features and performance.

[Guttenaffe]

The FX-60 is duel core; it's mostly a high quality 4800X2 (so it runs at 2.6GHz stock) with unlocked multipliers, big freaking deal for $404 more...

Hell go with an X4400 same core at the 4800 and FX60. It just can't clock as high when they tested it. Good chance it was due to some faults in the chip fab, though you can get them where more chips tested for 4800+ and up yet they needed 4400's to sell so they clock um down. Tis all the luck of the draw when you under buy...

Unless you know someone that works for AMD and you can get part numbers of under clocked chips that they aren’t suppose to tell people about, which would be sweet but we shall never know...

New socket? FX-60 the champ of 939? They don't even use all the pins of 939 with these duel core procs, wait till Horus comes out and you can have 8 socket-939's running duel cores on "HIGH" end PCs. Only problem is will take a large PCB because the traces for Hypertransport (what is used for Horus) can't be more than 100Ω impedance between points within the switch network. It's alright though cause it is a switch network but the more nodes the slower it will become and the latency increases because of this. So we will have wide traces and big PCB's or smaller traces with switches/repeaters along the way. The heat density will increase with this method as well, the Horus switched fabric chips get mighty hot.

[onelegout]

EEK! I don't have much experience with different processors, but I was wondering how much the fx-60 would cost you in the states? (presuming that you live in the states that is!) Over here in the UK it costs 710 quid, that's 1236 dollars! Thats more than my new sony vaio laptop cost!!! :D

[Guttenaffe]

Cheepest price for USA is $1,011.00 @ http://www.clubit.com

[ForceFedFlesh]

for a solid build it would probably be easiest to go with the fx-60. from what i've read it's living up to its benchmarks and it packs the best single chip performance to date.

I have heard of a lot of people taking advantage of a dual opteron setup, especially sine the single core 100 and 200 series chip have come down in price. The new opteron dual cores are impressive as well, and a quad core solution would be beautiful for a gaming/web/media streaming server. Though, as always it boils down to price; the cost of two dual core opterons plus ECC ram would be hefty, and the fx-60 pack plenty of power into a single chip at relatively half the cost.

Personally, I'd wait. The fx-60 is the final champion of the 939 socket series. I'd wait 2 year for AMD to implement their DDR3 memory architecture, and by that time the new socket series will have matured for opteron and A64 offering greater features and performance.

thanx for the replys and your right that i have to consider the cost. and also the fact that the fx-60 is all i need.;)

[ack ack]

New socket? FX-60 the champ of 939?

according to AMD's Roadmap the new processors with DDR2 support have different pin configurations and will not be compatible with current 939 sockets, hence the new M2 socket. Naturally, DDR3 architecture and the 60nm manufacturing conversion will produce an entirely new socket in a year or so. I guess i just declared the FX-60 the champ since it has posted the best benches so far and because it technically is the last chip in line produced for the original 939 socket.

[public_eyesore]

if your looking for the dual core oppys they are supposed to drastically come down in price this month, so either way i would wait one month cause the new socket will lower prices and amd's strategy sell more server procs will lower prices.


^^^run on

[DaveW]

I've just ordered in an Opteron 144. It's clocked at 1.8 Ghz, but with all that cache it has and it's excellent overcloking abilities, you can quite happily squeeze the same performance as the FX-57 out of the £115(OEM) processor. It used to be £95 for a PIB, but it's been so popular that AMD have upped the price. And who can blame them? Almost everywhere is sold out. Mine's due to arrive next monday, and i placed the order 3 weeks ago.

Guttenaffe, i don't think i understood a word of what you said. This is the first time i've heard of Horus, unless it's recently changed it's name-i think i know the technology that you're refferring too, but i've not heard it called under that name...to my knowledge.

-Dave

[ForceFedFlesh]

if your looking for the dual core oppys they are supposed to drastically come down in price this month, so either way i would wait one month cause the new socket will lower prices and amd's strategy sell more server procs will lower prices.


^^^run on

dual-core opterons are jus way to expensive even if the price is going down. i want 2 single core opterons and i also want to include 2 Geforce 7800GTX 512's in SLI. since the price of single core opterons are going down do u guys think 2 of em would be able to power the video cards

[Guttenaffe]

If AMD switches socket it is to increase sales and has nothing to do with if 939 is able to handle a new technology. Plus the benefit of DD2 for Main System memory is little to none. It is more of a gimmick than anything else, the high latency of DDR2 nearly removes any benefit you might gain. Not to even get into the cost of DD2 vs. current DDR technology... If anything AMD should wait for QDR (Quad Data Rate SDRAM) RAM if they whish to change their RAM style. It is much better to send 4 words per clock pump than one. Heck with modern 4-way Set Associative cache system QDR is perfect. I will it will require more pins, by its very nature increases the number of wires from the memory device to the memory controller. The best thing is it uses two clocks, one for read and another for write. I don't want to get on a rant about crazy marketing schemes that proc makers are doing, which really piss me off as people buy things when they don't really need/benefit from an upgrade.

As for Horus: http://www.hypertransport.org/docs/tech/horus_external_white_paper_final.pdf
Right form the HypTran consortium, is specs setup to allow 8 to 32 sockets, but the 1st boards using this will be nowhere near 32 sockets.

It is just a new way to use Hypertransport, there are competing architectures out there by different companies, examples: InfiniBand (intel), RapidIO (freescale, used to be motorola), and StarFabric (DoD and different Universities) to name a few. All are switch network point-to-point serial I/O technologies. I expect a merger and unification of the technology to happen before it is REAL common place. Competing technologies are a hindrance to productivity and the overall advancement of technology. That is why us electronic and electrical engineers banned together to formed IEEE and try to create inter-compatibility within our field.

[DaveW]

True. I recently bought a little ASROCK board with support for 939, AGP, PCI-16x, SATA, and SATA2. I was honestly considering letting the gem pass me buy, till i noticed the state of the latencies in DDR2. So i bought DDR and the DUAL. That board is only £46 by the way, and Custom PC, a UK computer-modding magasine, gave it 86% i believe. Not bad. So good, in fact, i bought 2.

That reminds me of when Bill gates said that in 2008 every computer will have 32 cores some time last year. I think he needs to re-evaluate moore's law.

-Dave