socket 754 or 939

grimloch

dont know if theres a thread on this already but,

on jes the AMD 64 3000 socket 754 and the AMD 64 3000 socket 939 are round the same price, anyone know if theres a performance difference between them?

Mec-a-nic

They are technically the same 'speed', but the 939 pin chip has those extra pins due to a second onboard memory controller.
This means the chip can access more system memory, more quickly. However it has half the cache of the the 754 chip...

Overall I think the 939 has other advantages (better channel width, HyperTransport) and seems to be the 'performance' package. 754 chips will be the 'value' line.

Any help?

grimloch

thanks for that

i was just wondering as the 939 used to be alot more expensive now theyre almost the same

cregser

I had a 754 socket spec ready to buy when the 939 was released. So I waited for the 939 to make the 754 drop in price. But recently two new FX CPUs were announced for the 939 socket range.

AFAIK Socket 754 has had it's day. I'll probably get a 939 now so that I can upgrade in future. Especially now that you say it has dropped in price.

grimloch

cregser wrote:

Especially now that you say it has dropped in price.

more than just dropped in price, the lower end 754s and 939 are almost the same price now that ive had a closer look at them

Azza

Up to very very recently I would of said socket 754 particularly with the DFI Lan Party motherboard making its way to 754 which was a great board. Also the fact that the 3400 (754) was cheaper than the entry level socket 939 the 3500 and outpreformed it due to the extra cache 1mb as to 512kbon the 3500. Motherboard prices are about the same and socket 939 dual channel memory seemed to only offer a very small performance increase not enough to compenstate for the cache difference and then there was the 3800 which despite having 1mb cache was way too expensive over €700 and consider I can clock my 3400 to its speeds (or the 3700 which is the same as the 3800 only on the different sockets)

Socket 939 had only 1 advantage and that was it had more of a future the 3700 being the last socket 754 amd 64 chip leaving to the socket to power the upcoming buget chip sempron. However I though it was a bit pointless as socket 939 will not support you pci graphics cards or SLI.....it will shortly.

However with the advent of the winchester core I would now opt for socket 939. These use the new 90nm architecture compared to the old 130m. They run cooler and require less stock voltage. They outpreform the old Newcastle chips by about 5% despite AMD saying there was no performance improvements. Like the old newcastle they run 512kb cache. However there is now 3 of these chips the 3000 3200 and 3500 meaning they have come down in price and made entry to 939 much more affordable. Also what interests me is there awesome overclockers....with 1.8ghz amd 64 3000 hitting 2.62Ghz on average air cool rigs. Unfortantly hard to get these chips at the moment. Have one on order myself maybe a while before I get it though. Its the road I would recommend any AMD 64 newcomer to take. The AMD 64 3000 just costs around €170 at tops and your almost certain to get at least 400mhz overclocks. Plus you get very small bonus of dual channel memory over sockect 754.