754 to 939

[MadRat]

You're missing the point, its 5% across the board in benchmarks for the memory alone and almost 5% for the increase in cache, noticeably more in some cases. The PCI-E offerings right now are slim at best, but by this summer you'll see promise; gfX card makers are down to a 6 month cycle.

Hardly castrated? S754 has always been neutered in more subtle ways, like horrid memory support. There are horror stories gallore out there how quality RAM sucked on S754's. The same RAM worked w/o issue in S939 boards. If you ever want more than 2 sticks of RAM then S754 isn't usually helpful, as most boards support 2 dimms. The ones that support three DIMMs require a major slowdown of the RAM to accommodate the increase in sticks.

The only S754's that compare favourably to S939 are Clawhammers. The newer S754's are Newcastle and have half the L2 cache. So much for the only thing keeping DC memory performance from sinking S754... The HT channels on S754 are capped at 800MHz. The newer S939's are all coming out at 1000Mhz from what I gather. Better HT support will make alot more difference when I/O reaches saturation levels, namely when dual PCI-E support allows you to run your 16X videocards in SLI.

 

[ktgktg]

Testing 12 Athlon 64s

Ok, it's just one test but still interesting. I don't care about future proofness, I always end up buying new mobo anyway...

 

[ktgktg]

I think that everybody who believes in a dual core S939 are fooling themselves. 12 months after the first A64 release we had three different sockets. They're not exactly afraid of making new sockets!
Or put it this way: If you buy a mobo today you want to upgrade CPU within 12 months, because after that the mobo will be too old, though it still might work. But the thing is that we won't see any dual core S939 this year, if ever. Probably for S1207 or S940 or something else.

Anything else is just wishful thinking. I just can't understand everybodys concerns about the mobos future proofness, never seen anything like this before. Have you forgotten how quickly they become old? Just buy the best for now, because you don't know what the future will bring (faster HTT, DDR2...). How long do you think the S939 will stay?

If you want that kind of future proofness (capable of using dual core CPU) maybe a uniprocessor Opteron system is a better choice! LOL..