939 Upgrade Question RE: Opteron 165

[jonnydaly42]

Hi all,

in 6 months I will be building a brand new rig, prob Intel based, however for now I'm trying to squeeze life out of my current setup.

I currently have an Opteron 146 OC'd to 2.5 with an Artic Cooling Freezer CPU cooler. It used to be fine at 2.7 but now seems to crash and overheat at that. My motherboard is a DFI Lan Party Ultra-D Nforce 3. My graphics card is x1950PRO 512mb AGP.

With that in mind I am considering purchasing an Opteron 165 X2 from

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/AMD-OPTE...tcZphotoQQcmdZViewItem

I'd assume thats a slightly inflated overclock figure but if I could push it to 2.7-2.8 would I see a notable improvement over the 146 AT 2.5? Worth the £60 outlay?

My main CPU hungry task is playing CS:S so mainly in this would I be looking for the improvement. Does dual core and a bigger L2 Cache have a significant benefit here?


Any help or opinions would be much appreciated.

 

[jonnydaly42]

bump

 

[NoSoup4You]

Probably won't see much improvement. Dual core is obviously nice to have. Personally I'd jump all over that, but everyone's different.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I think that it would be worth it, in the longer term. For the shorter term (read: non-multithreaded games), it would only be marginally worth it, if you could get it to OC to 2.7Ghz, which would be better than the 2.5Ghz you have now.

 

[vaylon]

I was in the same boat as the op's a few months back. I had a opty 148 that overclocked to 2.7 and with a better cooler could have easily hit 2.9. Nice, but I wanted more. So I bought a x2 3800+ , got it up to 2.7 on air with a stock cooler and no voltage adjustments. But, I wanted more so I got an am2 system , x2 6000+. I am still working with it, but even with speeds reaching 3.7 on air, I really can't see a big advantage in anything except a couple of high-end cad programs and adobe.
My biggest gain was going from the 148 to the dual core, but not in speed, but in the ability to do 2 task at once without taking a hit.
I really can't see any advantages for the speed from the 3.7 I have with the am2 from the 2.7 I had with the 3800+.Even tho the am2 has faster memory and larger pipelines.

If I had to do it over again I would have just stuck with the 3800 and saved my money and waited till something like the next generation chips come out. I also seem to be burned out on the speed issue also.
What good is it to have a 4ghz chip when it won't really get used?

 

[SlowSpyder]

I had a 3000+ @ 2.56ghz and upgraded to my 165 @ 2.7ghz. I see a difference in Neverwinter Nights 2, but I think that more from the slight ghz bump. The computer is more resposive to me, as soon as the desktop loads I can start clicking and opening things. Also, now I'm not afraid to burn a DVD and play a game. I can run F@H in the background and get full speed while gaming. Dual core has it's advantages, but don't expect a whole new computing experience. Things just seem to be a bit smoother, especially when doing a few things at once. I'd say go for it if you can get it cheap.