Now may be the time, especially if you're willing to overclock.
I was planning on holding out for a bit, but the word about the AMD
Opterons disappearing from the retail channel made me get myself an
Xmas present.
The Opterons are 64bit AMDs, but they have double the cache (1mb), and
are good overclockers.
Look for socket 939's - there are socket 940s, but those are for server
motherboards.
Models to look for are the 144 and 146's (single core) and 165 and
170's (dual core).
I got mine from Mwave, and it was here in 3 days - if it wasn't for
these damn holiday dinners I wouldn't be doing anything away from the
PC this weekend ;). I couldn't spring for the dual core, but this 144
should overclock nicely from 1.8 Ghz to around 2.8 Ghz, especially with
the huge Cooler Master Hyper 6+ cooler I got for it.
I feel stupid for getting an AGP 6800 Ultra now, but I was able to get
an AsRock m/b that has AGP and PCIe slots, so I can still upgrade
later.
Can't wait to get this puppy running - of course I waited to post until
I got mine ;) - also AVOID BUY.COM - terrible service, and they'll take
your order even when they don't have stock or any ETA.
Kendt
So far so good - 2.4 Ghz right out of the box, and the increased memory
bandwidth has made a big difference in performance. I was able to
clean the chipset drivers off my existing XP install and just do a
repair installation on the new system (be careful with doing that - I
did the same to move my 'work' PC over to the old game m/b, and it
failed completely).
Kendt - off to order GTL :)...
