As you should know, AMD recently moved from Socket 940 to Socket 939, and ExtremeTech have a nice article here, comparing the VIA K8T800 Pro and nVidia nForce3 250Gb chipsets. These new chipsets have a number of interesting features, including the elimination of the registered RAM requirement, which will make for cheaper and faster systems. There's a great series of comparisons of the two chipsets features - one has support for 4 SATA ports and mixed SATA and PATA, which is nice. But you'll have to read the article to see which comes out top!

More here.

OMG...I just went through the AMD crap with a friend last night, and I can't believe the confusion that this company has created for its users.

He purchased the FX-51, and picked him self out an ABIT mobo, and a Gig of paired Mushkin, and is going to have to send it back. The FX-51 is a 940 pin, and the mobo he purchased is for the 745 socket AMD64 normal run of the mill processor, and the freakin' RAM has to be ECC. Its true my friend should have researched more, but nothing should be this confusing.

If you search on Newegg for 940 socket mobo's you get 2 results...TWO...and they only have one for the 939, and like 3 pages of 745 socket.

You mean AMD got rid of ONE pin to make these things use Non-Ecc RAM? LOL...give it up AMD...you still have a long way to go. You're just making everyone upgrade.

At least Intel kept mainboards compatible when they upgraded Xeons from Socket 603 to 604, meaning that you can put a Socket 603 Xeon into a Socket 604 mainboard (at least it's physically compatible, not every board supports old Xeons).

This doesn't seem to be the case with AMD's Socket 939 and 940.

It really isnt that confusing, even for the Unregistered enthusiast, its just a matter of doing a little reading and research. If you do that, I think at the end of the day you wont look down upon it so much.

It's just further proof that Socket-940 wasn't meant to be in the mainstream market. AMD realised that OEM would rather have a DualChannel part to put up against the P4, otherwise people will flock to the P4 just because it's DualChannel & the Athlon64 was SingleChannel.

AMD had no choice but to simply rename it's 1xx Opteron & sell it to the mainstream. The Socket-939 Athlon64-FX is how it should've come out in the first place.

PS. The Athlon64-FX never required ECC Ram. It requires Registered DIMMs.

is 939 the FX's then theres the socket 940 for the future A64s right?

also, the 939/940 was never ment/planned on being mainstream! the 745 was

No.

Socket-939 will host Athlon64 & the new Athlon64-FX.

Socket-940 hosts Opteron 1xx/2xx/8xx & the 1st generation Athlon64-FX.

Socket-754 will host Athlon64 & the upcoming AthlonXPs.

ahh ok They're still continuing AXP's? Revamped or just new socketed AXP's?

Well it's gonna be the same as a SingleChannel Athlon64 without the 64-bit extensions. So it gets the on-die memory controller, HyperTransport, 0.13 SOI manufaturing & SSE2.

Sweet, ReVaMpEd it is.