Dual Athlon 64 system

[SH3200]

hi i was planning/saving for a dual athlon 64 system to bring to college @ june 04. All was going well till yesterday my mobo decided to kill itself. Now im debating whether to get a new mobo and scrap the athlon 64 plan OR somehow scrounge up a old motherboard and wait. There are a couple key issues with the athlon 64 im hoping someone might be able to answer.

1. Is there even a dual athlon 64 motherboard with dual channel memory in the works? I know the opteron ones exist but opterons are slightly above my price range
2. Will the athlon 64s in multi processor config be able to scale like the opterons
3. When will these likely to debut

thanks in advance

 

[Ryan]

I would wait

 

[SH3200]

any guestimate on any of em?

 

[dexvx]

How about wait till the time comes before pondering non-existant computer hardware thats 9 months in the future?

FYI, IIRC the Athlon 64 will be single processor based while the Opterons will scale to multiprocessor. AMD is going the Intel route by differentiating the 2 markets. It makes more sense $$ wise.

 

[UlricT]

right now, it looks like the Athlon 64 is going to be released as a single proc solution. BUT there MIGHT be a chance of Dual Athlons on some motherboards, because it seems the inital batch of athlons are going to have the same packaging (940 Pin) as the Opteron, meaning it could support 2 hypertransport Buses.

I would suggest you get a mid-range mobo, and scrounge up for the 64-bit procs! (since you ARE waiting till june '04)

 

[sandorski]

Originally posted by: SH3200
hi i was planning/saving for a dual athlon 64 system to bring to college @ june 04. All was going well till yesterday my mobo decided to kill itself. Now im debating whether to get a new mobo and scrap the athlon 64 plan OR somehow scrounge up a old motherboard and wait. There are a couple key issues with the athlon 64 im hoping someone might be able to answer.

1. Is there even a dual athlon 64 motherboard with dual channel memory in the works? I know the opteron ones exist but opterons are slightly above my price range
2. Will the athlon 64s in multi processor config be able to scale like the opterons
3. When will these likely to debut

thanks in advance

Tough question. I too was waiting for Athlon64(not dualies though) in the spring, happy with my Athlon XP 1700/K7 Master. Then the mobo fizzled and I went and bought an NForce 2 mobo. Once the shiny new mobo was in my hands, I couldn't withstand the temptation and bought a sparkling new 2800+ Barton to put in it.

Though the Athlon 64 comes out in about a month, being an early adaptor of new technology/gizmos is always a risky proposition. The processor itself will be fine, but the motherboars will likely have some issues to workout, no matter how long they are refined in a lab, the number of configurations in the RW will find something amiss. I also would think that if the Athlon64 ever has a Dual capability, I doubt the motherboards or even the cpus would be available at launch. If you really want up to date Dual AMD within the next few months, I'm pretty sure Opteron will be your only option.

Oh, you said June 04. Buy something(Socket A mobo) now to carry you over. By the time you need it, the availability of Dual Athlon64 will be a known fact or Opterons will likely be very affordable in the lower performance range.