im thinking about building a 64bit system next year and was wondering what processor to get. im concidering the 2.8GHz socket 939 opteron and the 4800 X2 Which one is the better processor. are the opterons worth the money or am i better off with an X2
The Opteron is the SAME chip as a Athlon64 but with a different name and target market. The Opty's are overclocking well, that's likely due to more stringent quality control that is typical with "server" chips. The reports that I have read have said that the socket 939 Opty's are being manufactured on the same line as the FX series chips, so they are getting the benefit of the most advanced manufacturing line at AMD. I say go with whichever chip is the best deal at the time of purchase. Since the architecture is the same it is 95% about MHz and 5% about the cache size (some A64 chips like the 3800+ X2 have only 512kb of cache).
