If anyone wants to build a really kick arss system from amd I have been tracking the opteron prices and they are falling quicker than Bush's approval ratings.
The overclocker of the last year has been hands down the Opteron 146 and 148, 2000 or 2200 HT (mhz) respectively.
People buy these and overclock them very easily, usually on air, to 2.8 or 3.0 and get performance that past any of the FX processors which where the fastest processors available until Intels code name Conroe and market name Core 2 Duo came along and shredded every benchmark. Just several months ago you had to pay nearly $200.00 or more for the 146 and 148.
Still the core from AMD that the benchmarks compare to is the FX-62 and if you overclock a single core Opty 146 or 148 up to 2.8 or 3.0 you are beating the FX-62 speeds and now you can do it for less than 100$ for the Opty 146.
Newegg just changed the prices for the 146 today down to $86.99 and the 148 for $115.99.
That's a hell of a lot of power for 86.00 smackers. One of my systems is an AMD 3500 which is a 2200 mhz cpu which I have had overclocked to 2500 for about a year. I think I'm going to order a 148 and set it up to 3.0 and basically have FX-62 power for some time in this machine.
The FX-62 is a dual core so there are some things that it does better than a single core opty in the areas of media encoding and such but as far as gaming and general performance, you can have a cutting edge processor now for 86 bucks if you want. That's unheard of.
If you want to get into a pci-e board this is a cheap way to go as you can get a decent overclocking board for this 939 socket for around $80.00 or less.
I'm still going to build a Core 2 Duo machine but I'm waiting until the DX10 cards come along and going to do it all at once. This will also give the motherboard manufacturors to put out lots of boards to choose from. Right now because the chipsets are so new and there is so little to choose from the really good boards with the 975 chipsets are all near $200.00 or more which is major price gauging. You can still get a cheaper 965 board if you want with just a few performance features turned off compared to the 975.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6819103596
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6819103598
