On Sun, 21 Mar 2004 16:56:57 +0000, Tone-EQ wrote:

I've been sitting here for an hour thinking about a new system, mainly about
the best time to buy (never really a good time with computers though!). I've
just read about socket "939". This May should bring with it the announcement
of this new socket (a 940 with a pin removed to use non-ECC memory). I want
an Athlon 64 FX, but after hearing about the 939 I'm gonna wait.
http://www.anandtech.com/cpu/showdoc.html?i=1985

Anyway, I want an Asus (or similar quality) socket 939 board with a Athlon
FX-53, with support for DDR2 (will that be possible with these
boards/processors at all), Gigabit LAN, PCI-Express (1x and 16x), 8x USB 2.0
ports, SATA RAID, while keeping all the IDE and floppy ports too. Oh, and
I'll of course be needing a PCI-X graphics card, anyone know of developments
on that side of things?


Regards,
Tony. (tony.cue(at)tiscali.co.uk)

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The first socket 939s are only going to have half of the cache as the 940
pin Opterons so you should expect to see some performance degradation
although there maybe some other improvements that make up for this. The
reason for the switch to the 939 pin package is not to get rid of ECC,
that will undoubtably be supported, but to simplify the pc board layout
which will both reduce the cost of the motherboards and allow for the use
of non-registered RAM. I'd guess that the savings for the motherboard
isn't going to be that great, maybe $50. The price difference between
registered and unregistered RAM at the 512M level is only $25, it's more
at the 1G level, closer to $100. Pricing for the 939s isn't known yet but
it's expected to be less than the FX chips. However the current FX is just
a rebranded top of the line Opteron 1xx which is priced at more than twice
the price of next speed step down (Opteron 148: $710, 146: $294, 144:
$211). The clock difference between each speed step is only 10% which
isn't noticable so dropping down to the 146 or even the 144 will cut the
price of your system considerably without any significant compromise in
performance.

Bottom line is that there is probably not much reason to wait for the
939s. If quality is a real concern then you probably want an Opteron
system anyway. The 939 boards are going to be optimized for price not
quality, 940 boards are server class boards, 939s are consumer class.