Down memory Lane : s939 Opterons

S

shinzwei

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Joined
Jul 19, 2004
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What was it about these cpus that made it so good? I remember back in the A64 days these dominated due to the fact that they overclocked very well correct?. People were using them in their gaming rigs and things just flew. Im on a [email protected] stoock volts. Hopefully IB will be worth the wait.
 
I used to run an Opteron 180 before going to my current setup. Loved my opty. I think it was due to better binning that they could oc so much.

That, and double the L2 cache!
 
Speaking of...I need to sell the one I have laying around.
Need some money!
 
shinzwei said:
What was it about these cpus that made it so good? I remember back in the A64 days these dominated due to the fact that they overclocked very well correct?. People were using them in their gaming rigs and things just flew.
Click to expand...

Socket 939 had its heyday when Intel was still struggling with its Prescott Pentium 4 CPUs. The Intel CPUs of that era ran very hot at even stock speed even with a good air cooler.
 
My 165 is still chuggin away in my second computer. I use it as a little mini server so its back to stock but it ran at 2.5ghz 24/7 for years with a slight bump in voltage.
 
My 165 was probably one of the best rigs I've ever built. That chip would hit 2.7 on damn near stock voltage and just under 3Ghz with a mild voltage bump. That chip rocked. Though I did cherry pick it.

Loved me some s939.
 
They on-die memory controller helped a ton when compared to the regulat Athlon XP chips.

Intel's P4 chips sucked really bad.

It wasn't that they were so crazy overclockable.. it was that they were so much faster than what Intel had at the time.
 
They were S939 chips, well-binned, very overclockable, and miles ahead of what Intel had to offer.
And well priced too.
 
My Opty 170 is still alive with a broken pin on a Evga Nforce 4 with 5 blown caps. I took a pin from an old Pentium and placed it in the corresponding hole with the missing pin so it would make contact :D. Fucking beast system, running pretty solid at 2ghz, mobo bsods any higher. Had it running 2.7ghz 24/7 for years as my main system.
 
Were people bashing Intel for their P4 Prescott line as much as they did with BD? I think I remember back in those days the AMD A64 cpus were pretty much in everyones new build or am I wrong? I had a A64 3400+ paired with an X1800XT. I thought I was pretty badass :D
 
shinzwei said:
Were people bashing Intel for their P4 Prescott line as much as they did with BD? I think I remember back in those days the AMD A64 cpus were pretty much in everyones new build or am I wrong? I had a A64 3400+ paired with an X1800XT. I thought I was pretty badass :D
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I was..

Not everybody was though because Intel was basically blackmailing OEMs into not using AMD CPUs.
 
shinzwei said:
Were people bashing Intel for their P4 Prescott line as much as they did with BD? I think I remember back in those days the AMD A64 cpus were pretty much in everyones new build or am I wrong? I had a A64 3400+ paired with an X1800XT. I thought I was pretty badass :D
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It was much worse, albeit without the "it's over, they're going bankrupt" rhetoric since Intel was clearly too entrenched.

I would also argue that P4s were much worse in comparison to s939 than Bulldozer is to 1155/1366 - albeit I'm pretty sure P4s didn't lose to P3s in benchmarks.
 
It wasn't so much the performance it was the fact that they put out enough heat that you could probably have designed a heat sink that fed into a Mr. Coffee or something equally ridiculous.

I had to use a P4 laptop for a little bit a few years back and when I tried to install windows, the thing kept overheating and rebooting. I had to go outside and hold it in the breeze to get it to properly format after the third try.
 
i got 2x opteron 2Ghz in a dual socket board running as a file server for our graphics deparment, sucker still going good!
 
Heres back then (2005) with -80C cpu cooling...

screenshot0523zn.jpg



This is now..

screenshot028v.jpg
 
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I think people see AMD with a pair of rose colored glasses. I've owned more AMD CPUs in my life than Intel. My first CPU was AMD (386 clone). God knows I love them...But their success during the A64 era was more due to Intel's failings than them suddenly coming up with a world-changer.

My ol' opty has retired to a long life as my parent's media server which they watch every day. The funny thing is that in that role, it will probably out-live all my other CPUs.
 
Everyone loves amd 939 because it was the best cpu at the best time for desktop gamers. Everything was flashy, I went from having my vanilla p4 mobo, to my dfi lanparty board in a case with a window and blue led's everywhere.

I don't have any stats but I would guess that right now the laptop market is much stronger than the desktop market and I would not be supprised if the gaming laptop market is bigger than the gaming desktop market. As result of this there is really no chip that brings back as strong a memory to me as my 165 opty
 
My favorite rig was my Opty 165. Clocked at 2.7 and paired with an 8800GTS 640 @ 625, this thing suited my needs for years, when I had no money. Now I have 5 rigs that are way faster, and I don't get half the enjoyment...
 
I never had one but I remember they were the best. At the time I was still using and amd xp chip. I contemplated getting a opty and new mb but I never did. And as the years went on I knew I missed the 'fun boat' so to speak with them and just forgot about it. I didn't upgrade until am2 came out.
 
Passed my FX-60/X800 rig on to my buddy a few months ago. He loves it, huge upgrade from his old Celeron something or other. Should have given it to him a while ago, it sat for over a year.
 
My mom uses my Opteron 170 with an MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum 74gb Raptor and a BFG 6800 ULTRA AGP lol..loved that rig, I never really OCed that Opteron, I should try it out sometime..
 
Had an Opteron 180 running at 2.7GHz in my DFI NForce4 SLI board with DDR500 ram, a 7900GTX and a Raptor HDD.

Ran it for years. The only reason I got rid of it was that prices at the tail end of 2009 for top end 939 gear were so crazy on Ebay. I sold the lot (except the Raptor) and it paid for 80% of my current rig.
 
I loved my 146.

Ran 2.85ghz for over 2 years.



Opteron 146 2ghz @ 2.85ghz
DFI LanParty NF4 Ultra-D
2x 512mb Crap RAM
Sapphire ATi Radeon X800GTO^2 @ X850XTPE 600/600 clocks.

Fully water cooled.
DD TDX Brass Top
DD Chipset Block
Maze 4 GPU Block
2x 120 Rad and a 1x 120 Rad.

All in a trusty old Antec P180.

Was probably my favourite computer... my new build in my sig with just the A8-3850 plays every game about the same performance or better. With the 6870 it murders that old rig.

 
It was certainly one of there few hay days so to speak. It was just better than what Intel had at the time by a fair margin, too much to be ignored. Important too, was that it was better as a single chip, and then the move to dual cores came along. Iirc, Intel's solution appeared to be more "bolt two together" for this. Either way, your choice was two superior AMD cores, or two shitty and hot Intel ones. Between this and x64, AMD starting to look like the trendsetter. AMD was capitalizing on a superior architecture.

I wondered how could Intel be so inept to answer for so long, and in the end it's just a blip in history. This was a shining moment for AMD, but in hindsight, Intel probably wasn't TOO worried. Their armor appeared chinked, but they were firmly entrenched and just sat in the back working on Conroe. They had capital, process advantages, and knew they'd be back on top. I haven't bought an AMD chip since.
 
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I also built an opteron gaming rig, back in the day. Speaking of which, my employer just upgraded their data center and gave me all the old opterons. I have 40 opteron 250's and im suppose to be getting 160 opteron 270 (dual cores) all socket 940, pm me if you want a couple i only ask that you cover shipping.

I am quite certain that P4 has much lower IPC then P3, but had much higher clocks to make up for it. We still have a ton of P4 machines in service at the office, I sometimes benchmarks them for quicks. a 3.6ghz pentium D with hyperthreading loses to my 2.6ghz sempron 130

I think fritz chess showed pentium D with hyper threading only twice as fast as a 1.2ghz p3 even though it had a 2.4ghz clock advantage and hyperthreading...
 
texuspete00 said:
It was certainly one of there few hay days so to speak. It was just better than what Intel had at the time by a fair margin, too much to be ignored. Important too, was that it was better as a single chip, and then the move to dual cores came along. Iirc, Intel's solution appeared to be more "bolt two together" for this. Either way, your choice was two superior AMD cores, or two shitty and hot Intel ones. Between this and x64, AMD starting to look like the trendsetter. AMD was capitalizing on a superior architecture.

I wondered how could Intel be so inept to answer for so long, and in the end it's just a blip in history. This was a shining moment for AMD, but in hindsight, Intel probably wasn't TOO worried. Their armor appeared chinked, but they were firmly entrenched and just sat in the back working on Conroe. They had capital, process advantages, and knew they'd be back on top. I haven't bought an AMD chip since.
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AMD got to comfortable on the A64 thrown and didn't do anything innovative after that, then Intel came and beat them down with the Core Series and has been history ever since.I agree, intel wasn't worried, they have enough money and resources to let someone else sit on top for a year or 2, and they will still sell more processors than them due to OEM contracts.

i don't buy the whole "true dual core / quad" crap. it is crap, considering Intel's beat AMD in everything pretty much, so not bad for a "bolt two together" set up. if AMD was a "true" dual / quad they should of had some advantage, which they really didnt.
 
MrGuvernment said:
AMD got to comfortable on the A64 thrown and didn't do anything innovative after that, then Intel came and beat them down with the Core Series and has been history ever since.
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Really, AMD got too comfortable? The original successor to K8 (instead of dual-core K8s launching), known as either K9 or Greyhound (which oddly enough was similar to the current Compute Scalable Architecture aka "Bulldozer"), was panned somewhere in the design stage. To make up for lost time, AMD made a dual core K8 and started work on the first K10, which was nothing like the Phenom K10.

AMD's problem was not 'lack of innovation'. The problem then, which is the same problem now, was a lack of resources.
 
AntiSocialMunky said:
Do you have any main boards to go with them? Those are DDR1 right?
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I must admit I'd be wary of buying a second hard 939 motherboard or any motherboard from around the 2004-2006 period.

A lot of them suffered from the bad capacitor scandal that broke around that time. Seen plenty PCs from that vintage with blown or bulging power caps.

Hence why most motherboards today have the solid style metal caps. Also the reason I got that new style ASROCK board.

http://www.asrock.com/mb/overview.asp?Model=939A785GMH/128M
 
Still have a 165 in storage as a backup incase something happens to my current system. The chip has nine lives or something. It's outlived like 4 mainboards that died from bad caps, bad cooling, bad power or my carelessness. I've been tempted to take that board and chip and make it into a file server but I don't want to spend the money on SATA cards as the board only had 2 ports and compared to current systems that thing sucks power. I can probably build a modern system that uses half the power that that chip can.
 
daglesj said:
I must admit I'd be wary of buying a second hard 939 motherboard or any motherboard from around the 2004-2006 period.

A lot of them suffered from the bad capacitor scandal that broke around that time. Seen plenty PCs from that vintage with blown or bulging power caps.

Hence why most motherboards today have the solid style metal caps. Also the reason I got that new style ASROCK board.

http://www.asrock.com/mb/overview.asp?Model=939A785GMH/128M
Click to expand...

That wasnt just a socket 939 issue, extremely common in our dell GX270's (Intel). Dell was forced to warranty them a few extra years due to some class action lawsuit. Dells older and newer then the 270 didnt seem to have the issue.
 
Spare-Flair said:
I think people see AMD with a pair of rose colored glasses. I've owned more AMD CPUs in my life than Intel. My first CPU was AMD (386 clone). God knows I love them...But their success during the A64 era was more due to Intel's failings than them suddenly coming up with a world-changer
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AMD64 is a world changer.
 
My Opteron 170 remains my favorite CPU. It was the best overclocking chip I've ever owned.
 
meh, over priced relative to the x2s for desktop use.

was another enthusiast trend that didn't necessarily translate to the normal user.

my x2 3800+ overclocked better and out performed my opterons.

It's just a memory, socket 939 rocked, opterons only played a role.
 
had a opty 170 in a lanparty (UT CFX3200?) MB. think the CPU & MB is sitting in a box somewhere. still works but i boxed it as i needed the case.
the opty rig got replaced by my current q6600/x38 (being retired soon)

had a giggle at this SuperPI time. my old q6600 3.7GHz was able to complete 1M in just under 14secs yet this BD at 6GHz is over 1/2 second slower. no disrespect to OP, SuperPI is and old benchmark focusing on x87 which AMD doesn't really care about any more.
still funny.

my newer x6 1100 @ 4.2 sucks in the bench also, only able to complete it in 16.5 secs.
centvalny said:
Heres back then (2005) with -80C cpu cooling...

This is now..

screenshot028v.jpg
Click to expand...
 
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