AM2 or 939?

[benjy20]

I have been thinking of upgrading for a while with a new mobo and cpu, with my eye on the socket 939 3700 san diego. I just noticed that it is on offer this week with a massive price cut, inc heatsink and fan. But then i noticed that they said 939 are no longer being produced and AM2 is now the newest thing. The cpu's are cheap but there doesnt seem to be many mobo's compared to 939 and also it used ddr2 which means having to get new memory.
Anyway just wondering whether it would still be a wise choice to go for the 939 3700 san diego and an nforce 4 sli mobo which would be the cheapest option for me or should i go to the AM2, which i dont really know much about and as its pretty new i have heard that the benefits are very small for gaming which it the main aim. Any advice would be great, cheers!

 

[fastco]

IMHO, I would stick with what you know and what will cost you the least and still perform very well. You can't go wrong with Socket 939. I think AM2 still has some issues to work out with DDR2.

 

[swker98]

IMO if your building now, i would ggo wih am2 if you want to be set for the future

or you can wait till july 24th and build an intel conroe system that supitly beats the pants off of amd

 

[KingCody]

just to clear something up, s-939 processors will still be produced until AMD announces that the will stop making them. they have announced that they will no longer produce any 3000+ and 3200+ models after this month, but the others will still be available for a while. there is still a big demand for s-939 processors (especially since they dropped the prices )

as far as performance goes there is not a huge difference between 939 and AM2 at the moment. the reason why is quite simple, they haven't made a new CPU yet, they simply modified the memory controllers from existing s-939 models to operate DDR2. K8L is the next generation AMD processor, but it will be months before that comes out

the bottom line is this... if you are planning to keep that system for a while, then save your money and go with 939. if you want to be able to upgrade the CPU without having to build another system then go with AM2.

hope this helps, good luck

 

[0009]

stick with the 939, give it a couple more years, something better will come out, than the am2 and conroe. even though i wouldnt buy neither. kinda waste of money for me since im not a hardcore multi tasker.

i stil browse the web while burning a dvd.. no lag, no errors.

 

[mod-newbie]

i am going to build another sokcet939 system soon. i do not see any reason to change to am2 yet because i do not want to buy ddr2 memory. i will prolly go am2 when the new kl8 processors can be bought. but until then ill just stick with my good old 939. the prices are getting really good rite now. i am interested in conroe but i hate intel so will prolly never buy one they have to much moolah they dont need to take mine from me hahahaaha

 

[whtddusy516]

I had this same question, on the AMD website they stated in an FAQ that they will keep producing there 939 processors as long as theres a demand, and as other people said, the prices just cut slashed INCREDIBLY and people will buy, at least those that dont care about Conroe lol

i dont know if this has anything to do with your decision, but after browsing wikipedia on Conroe i found this

"Yorkfield, eight-core MCM, 45 nm, 12 MiB L2, successor to Kentsfield"


:blackeye: AMD has some work to do haha

 

[KingCody]

you will not see any CPU advances beyond dual core under the socket-939 platform, but that doesn't mean that you'll be left in the dark either. socket-939 will still be a good system to have, and price/performance is hard to beat.

and you're right whtddusy, AMD does have some work to do but they are working! Conroe is a great leap in processor performance, but it still has weaknesses, and AMD will capitalize on those weaknesses when it releases K8L. The K8L will have an L3 cache on die and each core will get there own private L2 cache, a faster hypertransport, and other advances as well.

 

[benjy20]

Thanks guys for the responses, think i will probably go with a s-939 for the time being with the price and the fact the the am2 is relatively new so i will wait until its a bit more established i think. Cheers guys

 

[whtddusy516]

good choice, another thing that i dont think anyone mentioned is that the performance between the two is basically identical, its just that the AM2 is going to have the newer processors.

 

[KingCody]

the performance between the two is basically identical

that's because the processors themselves are basically identical.

AMD hasn't actually made a new processor yet. the simply modifed the memory controller on existing socket-939 processors to run DDR2.