Opteron 148 or Athlon 64 3700+

[kgeissler 0]

I am going to be upgrading my Athlon 2800+ and saw that both the Opteron 148 and Athlon 64 3700+ were about the same price. Any idea what the difference between the processors is? I am going to be using it in conjuction with a Geforce 7800GT to play games with. I won't be overclocking at all.

 

Any opinions on these processors? Help me decide which one to get...

 

TIA

[jmmijo 1]

Well I like both, however you have to ask yourself one question on this one:

 

"I'm playing games so why would I need a workstation motherboard that only supports ECC-REG memory to play games on?"

 

You probably would not unless you also intend to use that workstation as a graphics/video editing machine. Also note that all Opteron CPU's use the socket 940 motherboard and are not pin compatible with the socket 939 boards.

 

I would stick with the Athlon 3500~3800 machine with a socket 939 and non-ECC memory in a dual-channel configuration. This way you can upgrade to either the FX/X2 series CPU's as well sometime in the future.

 

Just my $0.03 worth

[mjwebb007 0]

What about the 1-series Opterons (Venice and Denmark cores)? They are 939-pin processors, although being phased out, they are still pin compatible. There are 939 and 940 server boards out there. I would like to think that the 939 Opterons do not require ECC memory but I don't know. That's why I posted my post about using a 939 Opteron with an MSI Neo4 Platinum board.

[jmmijo 1]

Since I'm not familiar with any of the Socket 939 Opteron's I really can't say.

 

I've only built a few dual-Opteron servers based around the 2xx series and using some very nice Tyan motherboards for graphic workstations for a couple of clients

 

If indeed you can find an Opteron socket 939 then I see no reason why you would have to use ECC-REG memory as I've yet to see a desktop board use ECC, except the Intel 975 chipset boards.

 

So I would say if you can find one then great, but look at the FSB speed and see if it's the same as the Athlon 64 CPU you are looking at and how much L2 cache does it come with, like 1MB vs. 512K.