Which Socket 734 or 939? AMD

[siberain]

I'm currently upgrading my rig.. the s939 just came out and are heavily overpriced...

should i wait or pickup a s734?

big performance difference?

Note: I dont plan to oc.

 

[Shimmishim]

i think you mean socket 754

what will you be doing mostly? i assume gaming...

and how much do you want to spend?

because the 3400+ 754 is priced almost the same as a 3500+ 939....

 

[Megatomic]

Just wait a little while for the prices to drop a bit and get a Socket 939 A64 system. The S939 Athlons all have a dual channel memory controller (an improvement from S754). Also, the chipsets for the S939 platform are much improved from the last generation. The NF3-250 Gb is a hell of a lot better than the NF3-150 feature wise and it has a faster HT speed. The K8T800 Pro also has a faster HT speed than the K8T800, but it also has a working AGP/PCI bus lock. You don't plan to overclock, but if you ever do the locked buses will help with that a lot.

Happy hunting.

 

[Shimmishim]

Originally posted by: Megatomic
Just wait a little while for the prices to drop a bit and get a Socket 939 A64 system. The S939 Athlons all have a dual channel memory controller (an improvement from S754). Also, the chipsets for the S939 platform are much improved from the last generation. The NF3-250 Gb is a hell of a lot better than the NF3-150 feature wise and it has a faster HT speed. The K8T800 Pro also has a faster HT speed than the K8T800, but it also has a working AGP/PCI bus lock. You don't plan to overclock, but if you ever do the locked buses will help with that a lot.

Happy hunting.

prices dropped recently... how soon you think they'll drop again?

 

[DAPUNISHER]

Beautiful overclock Shim :beer: Now put a real vid card in that rig to do it justice.

BTW, I'd love to see the 3D '03 and AQ3 CPU scores on it. You will be updating your thread@BE soon I hope.

 

[Megatomic]

Originally posted by: Shimmishim

Originally posted by: Megatomic
Just wait a little while for the prices to drop a bit and get a Socket 939 A64 system. The S939 Athlons all have a dual channel memory controller (an improvement from S754). Also, the chipsets for the S939 platform are much improved from the last generation. The NF3-250 Gb is a hell of a lot better than the NF3-150 feature wise and it has a faster HT speed. The K8T800 Pro also has a faster HT speed than the K8T800, but it also has a working AGP/PCI bus lock. You don't plan to overclock, but if you ever do the locked buses will help with that a lot.

Happy hunting.

prices dropped recently... how soon you think they'll drop again?

I didn't know they dropped. I have not been keeping tabs on prices over the past month. I'm standing pat on my current mobo/CPU setup until S939 NF3-250 Gb/A64 combos are more affordable to me. To my knowledge no one is selling S939 NF3-250 Gb boards yet anyway.

 

[arcas]

There was a time when I was firmly in the S939 camp. I had bought into the hype that the single memory channel for S754 was going to send performance down the toilet compared to S939/940.

But look at Anand's own S939 vs S940 vs S754 benchmarks. Given the same CPU speed, S939/940 chips were indeed faster. Up to 11.4% faster in some of the SPECperf benchmarks and generally 2-6% faster in other benchmarks including gaming. These benchmarks make it clear that the A64 architecture is generally not starved for memory-bandwidth.

Given these results, I personally see no reason to eschew current S754 offerings in favor of S939 unless (a) the price difference is less than 6% or (b) you know the application you have in mind will benefit from the additional available bandwidth. In the future, when S754 has been relegated to the domain of 32-bit 256KB Semperons, sure S939 will be more compelling but not today.

 

[Shimmishim]

Originally posted by: arcas
There was a time when I was firmly in the S939 camp. I had bought into the hype that the single memory channel for S754 was going to send performance down the toilet compared to S939/940.

But look at Anand's own S939 vs S940 vs S754 benchmarks. Given the same CPU speed, S939/940 chips were indeed faster. Up to 11.4% faster in some of the SPECperf benchmarks and generally 2-6% faster in other benchmarks including gaming. These benchmarks make it clear that the A64 architecture is generally not starved for memory-bandwidth.

Given these results, I personally see no reason to eschew current S754 offerings in favor of S939 unless (a) the price difference is less than 6% or (b) you know the application you have in mind will benefit from the additional available bandwidth. In the future, when S754 has been relegated to the domain of 32-bit 256KB Semperons, sure S939 will be more compelling but not today.

yeah i think you put it very well arcas

 

[siberain]

Yea I plan on gaming, but I want to buy a socket where in a year i can just change the cpu instead

of changing my whole rip








Current Rig:

AthlonXP 1600+/ BFG Tech 6800 GT/ 512 PC2100 DDR/ Asus A7M266

Im trynig to hold off as long as possible for the S939 prices to drop and pick one up,

since in the near future I can either change the CPU or even put an FX chip inside.

 

[arcas]

I dunno. That seems like a pretty noble plan but things rarely work out that way. Granted, I haven't upgraded a system in over 3 years (which is one of the reasons I was looking at dual XP mobiles in a recent thread here) but I used to play the frequent upgrade game and I can think of only one upgrade where I simply added a faster CPU to an existing mainboard. Every other case I wound up upgrading the mainboard, too, even if the old mainboard will have supported the new CPU. It was always a situation of the new board benching faster or offering something better...say, onboard RAID or better overclocking options or simply a better chipset (KT-133 vs KT-133a, etc). Any board you buy today, save for high end server boards, will be old and busted 12-18 months from now. Even if your model board is still available, it might be backlevel by 2 or 3 revisions (perhaps something that a simple BIOS upgrade can't fix).

IMO, it's just a foolish game to play especially when you figure you can sell your old board for, say, 25-35% of the original cost.