Opteron or Athlon/Phenom

[DrPepper]

I've always wondered is there a performance differance between say an opteron and the equivelant athlon/phenom in games because I remember seeing people brag about swapping their athlon for an opteron or their C2D for a xeon.

[hat]

No performance difference. The only thing is server chips are higher binned and can take higher temperatures, and can oc further on less voltage

[DrPepper]

Cheers hat.

[spearman914]

Agreed with hat. Theres no potential difference between chips. I suggest if not multitasking get opeteron, gaming athlon, gaming/folding/multitasking phenom.

[WarEagleAU]

Aye, HAt is right. But with chips today, ID go with the phenom.

[spearman914]

Aye, HAt is right. But with chips today, ID go with the phenom.

Phenoms come in Tri-Cores and Quad-Cores. Recently the Phenom Quads suck with overclocking. You can't even push it 50 MHz more with stock volts.

[DrPepper]

Hmm I wasn't actualy interested in buying one it's just in case I am getting one say in a few years if the server proc was better than the others. Cheers for the help :toast:

[btarunr]

If you choose an Opteron over a Phenom, make sure it's a Barcelona (of the latest revision C0), they come with a hardware fix for the TLB bug.

It's not that Opteron's can't OC well, but that the boards that run an Opteron (those socket 1207 server/workstation boards) come with little or no CPU parameter options in their BIOS. So it kind of nullifies the argument that they're 'higher binned' and hence OC well. Maybe they resist heat better but nothing really above that.

Good luck finding a socket 1207 cooler, because most Barcelona SKU's don't ship with a stock cooler.

If you really want a crazy OC for a pair of Barclona's, choose an ASUS L1N32SLI-WS B. That's based on the NVidia NForce 680a SLI and is touted to come with a decent set of OC options through the BIOS.

[DrPepper]

Good luck finding a socket 1207 cooler, because most Barcelona SKU's don't ship with a stock cooler.

1207 :eek: never heard of that.

[Silverel]

Optys are pimp material.

However, given the vast amount of choices you have with cooling, go with an AM2+ board and processor. X3's have been able to clock into the 3.4ghz range :)

[Darknova]

Ok, let's go back to the 939 era, (yes, that far back heh). The Opterons back then were nothing more than the "best of the best" athlon cores. They overclocked better, used less voltage and could take higher temperatures.

It wasn't really a seperate server chip, at least not the 1000 series.

It tends to be that the Xeons, and Opterons that run on the same socket as your standard desktop chips, are nothing more than "the best of the best" cores :)

[WarEagleAU]

Actually todays Phenoms (9850, etc) and the tri cores over clock pretty decently. Sure they arent INTEL level yet, but they still oc pretty damn well.

[btarunr]

1207 :eek: never heard of that.

That's the only socket in which you find quad-core Opterons.

http://www.sandpile.org/impl/pics/amd/k8/socket_f1207.jpg

It's also known as Socket F. It's a land-grid-array.

[OzzmanFloyd120]

The older optys usually had more cache than the Athlon 64s of that era, 1mb per core vs 512k per core.

[btarunr]

Cache size in AMD's domain really isn't something that should affect your decisions. Just because an Intel Yorkfield/Harpertown ships with 12 MB total L2, and a Barcelona ships with 512 KB /core L2, don't find it an inferior architecture. Intel needs all that cache due to an inferior system FSB while AMD quads exploit high bandwidth HyperTransport 3.0 , so it really doesn't need large caches as there aren't big queues of threads / instructions / data that need to be pooled into a cache.