bit of a noob needs advice

[cypher007]

ok this may be a daft question but ive not bought any new hardware for about 18months, so need a quick refresh on whats happened on the harware scene lately. im thinking of upgrading my system and have noticed people overclocking opterons, which i thought only worked on server apps, anyway is it better to buy an opteron 170 dual core or athlon64 4400+ dual core? also i did try and upgrade to a dfi lan party nforce4 system about a year ago, it was the worst motherboard i think ive ever tried overclocking. now ive noticed most people here are running dfi motherboards, ive got two sticks of corsair xms TWINX1024-4400C25PT, which will run upto 270fsb on my msi 7025 nforce3, but which couldnt reach 225 stable on the dfi. have they fixed this problem yet because i dont want to go for a dfi motherboard and find the same problems. also im slightly confused about the pci express motherboards, i just want to run one graphics card, which configuration would suite, so im not wasting money on a sli system i dont need. wow this post goes on forever.

[Dragonwing]

I've got 2 opterons right now. A 165 and 170. Both OC very well. The price of opterons has gone up slightly in the last little while. Personally, I would go for an opteron before an X2. I'm not knocking X2's at all, just notice on this forum that opterons seem to oc better than X2's. I saw a post somewhere tonight by someone with an 0206 3800+X2 an it OC'd really well. I don't know if that helps you at all. As far as DFI is concerned, they can be really tough to set up sometimes. There are alot of memory settings available on DFI boards that if not set up properly, can cause serious system instability (and major head aches). The board in my sig came out of the box, got flashed and is an OC champ. It is not SLI and does not support SATA2, but it can be modded to accomidate both. Its cheap and it rocks! I also have an SLI-DR, it rocks too! (Sorry, my post is going on forever too). So, in closing :) Opterons = :), DFI = :) If you do get a DFI board, I would gladly help you out with your settings.

[cypher007]

thank you for the info and offer of setting up my memory timmings, i fear after my last exprience it might be a corsair xms4400 issue, as there were lots of posts about this compatibility issue on this very forum when i was setting up the memory timmings all those months ago. im going to change the agp 6800 for a pci express 7800 probably. also why would i be better off getting a 165 over a 170 when the 165 has a lower starting speed, surley making it harder to overclock and i thought the 170 had 2mb l2 cache the same as the 165? alot of people selling opterons on ebay mention the stepping, which is currently the best?

[cypher007]

bump

[cypher007]

ok can someone tell me what the difference is between these two opteron's.

CCB1E 0550VPMW
CCBWE 0550UPMW

[Dragonwing]

I believe the CCB1E is single core while the CCBWE is dual core

[aussie7]

If your going NF4 MB and PCI-E you will need a new PSU with a 24pin ATX connector. Also I remeber reading the DFI board don't work well with Corsair ram so maybe you should get some G.Skill or similar TCCD :)

[aussie7]

ok can someone tell me what the difference is between these two opteron's.

CCB1E 0550VPMW
CCBWE 0550UPMW

Try searching google and here for the steppings and see which overclocks higher :D

This will give you some idea of which chip may be better in your setup

[Kobalt]

CCBWE 0550UPMW is a golden stepping.

But, if I were you I would wait a few months until the new socket comes out (or at least until we know when it will be coming out?). Your system seems plenty good right now. A newcastle at 2.7GHz isn't something to complain about. The only area where you're lacking is in RAM. 512MB isn't too much these days. Really, you won't notice much of a performance jump unless you get a dual core chip, a 7800 series card, and more ram, all of which is going to be very expensive for not THAT much of a performance increase.