Which reminds me how disappointed I was when I found what's going to be the socket lifespan of Bulldozer: ZERO. AM3 then bye bye.
Lame...........
Not everyone really cares if they can upgrade their CPU on the same socket. I am pretty sure in 2-3 years from now, we'll want a brand new mobo for Bulldozer Next / Haswell anyway (PCIe 3.0, SATA-Express, Thunderbolt, other cool features, etc.). The most important thing is that BD architecture is good from performance / watt, multi-threaded performance per module, and instructions per clock / per core performance. This architecture will be with us for a while, whether or not AM3+ will be replaced by FM+ or some other socket is of little concern really.
Socket A lasted from 2000 to late 2004. A lost of Socket A boards supported 333 MT/s FSB, so you could realistically move from a 600 MHz Duron to an Athlon XP 3200+.
That said, the 333 MT/s FSB 3200+ was an oddity.
This is where people fall into the socket trap. Socket A may have lasted for that long but motherboards sure as hell didn't! I know I had an Athlon XP1600+.
First Via 266 got upgraded to 266A, then we got Via333 and Via400. So ya, along the way your 266 motherboard got stuck at XP2700+. After that if you wanted to get that magical Barton 2500+ to 3200+ speeds you needed a 400 FSB capable board. So if you had a Via333 board, you were out without overclocking. And then there was the fact that the Athlon platform needed at minimum a 1:1 CPU:Ram ratio (or at least as far as I remember). As such, I am pretty sure you needed fast enough Ram (i.e., when XP+ first debuted, most Ram was still DDR266 and over time transitioned to DDR400). Therefore, by the time FSB400 chips arrived, your ram from 2 years ago wasn't fast enough to enable those speeds. And then there were additional features brought along the way such as nForce 2 boards with awesome onboard sound. It was a lot more complicated than you make it sound.
Same with Socket 775. You are missing key transitions such as SATAI --> II, AGP to PCIe, etc. In other words, sure the motherboards were all Socket 775, but the features on the boards continued to evolve making older boards completely obsolete.
Personally, I would rather sell my CPU+Mobo+Ram and keep upgrading to better parts every 2-3 years. I also find it's a lot easier to sell these 3 components in a combo since many users with older systems want a quick swap upgrade. I have been reselling the parts for at least 5 years and I find that it has worked far better for me to either sell the package or the entire system than on a piece by piece basis. I find I always get very low offers when I am just trying to sell the CPU or the motherboard. So from a resale value, it also works out better to get rid of the mobo + CPU (and even Ram) at once (at least in my experience).
Facebook
Twitter