A tribute to the 939 chipset.. my story heh

[shocky123]

Maybe it's just me.. and a weird quirk of fate that allows this.. but I'd just like to say that I'm totally blown away by the performance of my AMD64 3200+ (939pin) system at home.. particularly with respect to the power consumption and heat generation of the cpu.

It seems that everytime I feel like upping and/or pushing the threshold a little higher on my poor processor, it does a 180 and kicks me right in the face with even more amazing results than I had expected....
It's a 2.0Ghz chip by default, and I had been running it at 2.2Ghz for a while, until I upgraded to my new 6800GT last week. I noticed that even though my 3d2001 results were higher, they surely must be able to go higher with a little OC on the card.. Much to my surprise, no improvement really in the default/stock setup for the benchmark.. This is obviously that great cpu speed thingy that 3d2001 has going on....
So I figured I'd try the cpu upped to 2.4ghz... A few tweeks to some settings in bios, and voila, 2.4 ghz (had to lower the memory bus to 166 instead of 200 after my ram got pissy.. and had to lower the HT bus to a 4x multiplier... not sure if it was the HT/multiplier getting pissed, or the ram, I'll have to look at that -though likely the ram)

Alright, got everything running, and hesitantly waited for my evil OS -which we wont name- to boot up. Yup it booted, thats a good sign, so how are we doing for temps?
WTF?
CPU: 29C? Yeah, it dropped 2 degrees Celsius...
(You know I seem to recall the same thing happening when I originally upped it to 2.2 from 2.0)
And full load temps? after an hour of Far Cry at max settings?
[limited to 1280x1024 due to my ghetto-but still crankin away- Gateway CRT]
43C was the highest it got.
- I wish I could say the same for my gpu, which hits upper 60's easily -
- LOL, and I'm staring at my workstation's temps right now, idling steady @ 58C (dual-core P4)

So yeah... I'll leave it at that, I'm thrilled I made this choice, and cannot wait until the new DDR500-capable chips come next year, though I likely will not be in the market, this box is gonna take me through good times and bad.

Good work AMD.

~Kyle

[bachviet]

AMD 64-bit and dual-core CPUs kick a$$.

[SnowSurfer]

i have a athlon xp mobile overclocked and i love it, I will have to break down and upgrade to a 939 eventually (summer time is my time frame) but the system still plays fear and quake 4 on medium settings, the video card is a 9700 pro...not bad.

AMD is so much better than intel at the moment but i dunno if that is biased or not, ive had both, im sure intel has some pros....theres gotta be something

[glagic]

i was looking into building myself a system sometime in the near future and was looking at the 939 chipsets. Any recommendations on waht to buy or if i should wait for now? also, i've never built a computer from scratch, is it hard to do?

[cheapchinese]

try my config
I just finished, cost under 1k

$250 AMD 64 3500+ (not dual core, too expensive)
$200 4 gb of 3200 corsair value ram
$100 300 gb Seagate 7200 rpm 16mb cache UATA
$200 Asus A8N-VM motherboard
$100 Aspire X-Qpack
$60 16X DVD Dual Writer

I'm waiting on VideoCard to drop, and my MB has video built in, so I can do my daily task no problem

I like my config, cause its quiet and cool

[_=DeltaForce=_]

damm you got 4 gigs of RAM.. HOly CRAP
How fast do the games, OS load up??

I got 2 x 1gig DDR2 PC4200 Corsair ram in my laptop and its Awesome!

[clutchy]

I have the same chip. It's really an awesome proc. I might do a little OC on my next reformat, but my OS is way too unstable now to try anything fishy...

[cheapchinese]

damm you got 4 gigs of RAM.. HOly CRAP
How fast do the games, OS load up??

I got 2 x 1gig DDR2 PC4200 Corsair ram in my laptop and its Awesome!

I got em cheap
Fry's had an after xmas sale, where 2 gig (2 x 1 gb) was only 99

if there's some test i can do, i'll do it and post the result

speedwise, it is faster than my last computer. But thats comparing apples and oranges, b/c I had an 2.4 Intel

[modena]

Yes I love my new athlon 64 3700+ with 1mb L2. By the way, is there somewhere that list like idle and load temps that are ok for this and other chips. I want to overclock this new chip, I have adequate cooling, just wanted to get some figures on reasonable temps to remain at or under, or if there is a "standard" amount of OC'ing people are doing on this chip or similar ones.

But all in all, i love this new system I have. Only 1 gig of RAM however with the Display settings cranked up in WoW and with bitcomet and multiple IE's open in the background, I can 90% of the time Alt+Tab between the game and the desktop instantly (like i am switching between IE's with nothing else open). Every once in awhile I get some delay (usually when in Ironforge, a graphic and bandwidth intense area), but I think that another GB of RAM will do the trick (probably will purchase that around 01/21/06, my bday!)!!!!

AMD ROCKS!

[shocky123]

modena.. if you goto Motherboard monitor's website .. (google "MBM5") there is some sorta CPU temperature reporting utility that comes w/ their MBM program, you can look at archives if you're curious about your particular chip's temps.

And for the Alt-Tab'ing... that's just based on how much of the OS/Explorer got dumped to hard-disk while you were playing games. If you have lots of ram, or are playing a game that isnt using a ton of ram, you can do that too

I'll see if I can find some numbers for you on temps after I get home.

~Kyle

[modena]

ok i found some decent info on how much to OC my cpu, thing is this, i have the option with easytune (which came with my mobo), to do the memory as well (it is now set at 200mhz, 2.60V). My RAM is DDR466. Can I bump that up at all, or is it pointless?

[nate el bueno]

I've got the AMD 64 3500 with the venice core. i recently installed a water cooling unit, and tried overclocking when daversinger was at my house. using the a8n-e, we easily got it to 2.6, and the temps never rose over 34. i have yet to see how high it actually goes. i'd love to have a 3.4 or so...lol

[Kevster]

I hate you all! I have a perfectly fine barton 3000+ and all this talk is tempting me waaaaay to much to upgrade. The only problem with this is that I'd have to upgrade Mobo, processor, memory, watercooling block, etc and then have to deal with XP's upgrade nonsense.