Which budget Socket 939 Processor?

Ok I'm getting a new Asus A8N-SLi Deluxe soon, and I need a PSU and Processor to accompany it. I have been looking around a little bit, and I would be getting either

- Athlon 64 3000 Venice
- Opteron 144

Now I was originally going to get the 3000; since I know its a bit of an overclocker, and its the cheapest 939 lol. But all this fuss is going on with the new socket 939 Opteron, and it can overclock really well on air? So wtf? I am no stranger to overclocking, and I will probably end up getting a decent HSF (not high end, but something like the Artic Silencer, Silent tower, something under £20) so I don't know what would be best for me.

Socket 754 is kinda out the question I'm fraid. I know they are getting new SLI boards and such but thats like buying yesterdays technology with a new haircut.

Any help is much appreciated, and shall be spammed by thanks afterwards :rockon:

Skt 754 isn't a smart way to go anyway, so forget about it if you've got 939 money.

I'd say the venice, as I believe they're more rounded chips then the opterons, but I'm not entirely sure why I think that, or if I'm even right. Good luck :)

Possibly wait until a few people have got their hands on the opteron 144 and see how it overclocks. If its as good as the 3000+ venice then buy it. Its got 1mb lv2 cache as well like a sandiego.

yes id say a 3000 venice, very stable and nice chip if you dont intend on heavy overclocking.

Or even good for a silent/low noise system

Well the Opteron sounds good, people seem to be raving how this clocks ridiculously high, I really want to see game performance benchmarks though because thats where I will notice the power at. Encoding etc is good but I hardly do any of that, the only processor-intensive tasks I do really is gaming.

They are both good processors fortunately anyway so I can't really lose :D

Very tempted for a 3000+ Venice core after reading this

http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=1255&page=9

Opterons go through much stricter qualification processes than athlons. There are very, very, few bad opterons.

Anyway not all 3000+s are equal. There are a few that will do nearly 3Ghz on air and there are some that have serious trouble with more than 2.1Ghz. The average for the earlier ones is around 2.7GHz on stock voltage, current ones tend to not OC as well. AMD apparently gets better at binning chips as time goes on so the earliest low end chips in a line OC the best. As time goes on fewer really good cores make it to the bottom.

I have a 3000+ venice LBBLE week 17 APCW (the one in the hexus review is a week 12). It does 2.66GHz with 1.475v with complete stability, but higher clocks require exponentially more voltage. Stability testing is also tricky. the chip works passably well at a huge range of clocks and voltages (I originally though I had it stable at 1.4v, 2.8Ghz) and I had to do some really serious testing to find the actual limits.

Another thing about the venice chips, they have much lower max operating temps than previous cpus. The max tCASE temp for my particular venice is 57C and it's one of the more tolerantly ratted ones. My old newcastle was ratted for 70C. The rattings are realistic as well. The venice gets unstable at much lower temperatures than my newcastle did.

The opteron is s940 and s940 MB's are very expensive! around 200 pound...Maybe there are cheaper ones out there.

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Originally Posted by zaphod

The opteron is s940 and s940 MB's are very expensive! around 200 pound...Maybe there are cheaper ones out there.

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939 Opterons are out there... :)