Nice rig! I also am using an opteron 170 in my 939 rig and it certainly is a capable CPU. I actually downgraded from an FX60 to the opty 170. As you said the top end 939 CPUs are kinda ridiculous price wise, and I decided to take advantage of that and got well over $100 for it, which was more than I paid for it two years ago! I gotta say though, that FX60 was a beast. Still did great with Win7 and modern web usage (it did have 4gb of DDR and am hd4850).

I also have an FX55, and an opteron 144 that I seem to remember overclocked like the dickens, but I kinda wanted the dual core feature rather than the higher clock speeds which is why I'm using the 170.

Once I get bored with my newest build (754) I'll put up some pics of the 939. 🤣

Thanks for sharing!

Very nice, i have a similiar PC (dual core opteron and geforce 6800 gt) and am using windows 10 with it, but I am only using an IDE drive.
How is your SATA drive working? That board uses an old VIA chipset and I heard that modern SATA drives arent working with the onboard controller.

petro89 wrote:

Nice rig! I also am using an opteron 170 in my 939 rig and it certainly is a capable CPU. I actually downgraded from an FX60 to […]
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Nice rig! I also am using an opteron 170 in my 939 rig and it certainly is a capable CPU. I actually downgraded from an FX60 to the opty 170. As you said the top end 939 CPUs are kinda ridiculous price wise, and I decided to take advantage of that and got well over $100 for it, which was more than I paid for it two years ago! I gotta say though, that FX60 was a beast. Still did great with Win7 and modern web usage (it did have 4gb of DDR and am hd4850).

I also have an FX55, and an opteron 144 that I seem to remember overclocked like the dickens, but I kinda wanted the dual core feature rather than the higher clock speeds which is why I'm using the 170.

Once I get bored with my newest build (754) I'll put up some pics of the 939. 🤣

Thanks for sharing!

Initially, I was running an Opteron 148 which is a single core 2.2Ghz chip when I encountered the heat issues (got the CPU and heatsink in a bundle, so decided to upgrade to dual core). interestingly I found that even in games which weren't SMP aware, the frame rates were about the same, Im guessing the fact Windows can run on a separate core makes the 200Mhz difference negligible.

Voset wrote:

Very nice, i have a similar PC (dual core opteron and geforce 6800 gt) and am using windows 10 with it, but I am only using an IDE drive.
How is your SATA drive working? That board uses an old VIA chipset and I heard that modern SATA drives arent working with the onboard controller.

Good question , the BIOS does have an option labled "SATA RAID" which , if enabled will not let me boot, it wont even attempt to boot into Windows .
When its off it works fine, though it recognises the SATA drive as being an "IDE3" device, so I guess its doesnt work the best, though I don't think Im losing any functionality or speed otherwise.

You need to include a VIA RAID driver into Win XP installation (using nLite) or manually add it from floppy, before Win XP actual installation (ie. the "infamous" F6-key).
It's not possible for Win XP to use RAID mode, after it was installed in IDE Compatible mode (in Vista/Win 7 it is possible using driver registry modification).

Opteron ? single cpu?

OK....

Anyway nice looking system! And grate pick on the mobo!

Nice build! Better now than never before the prices get prohibitive. Going to upgrade the cooling by chance even if it is just for looks?

My Opteron 939 setup has a 180 or 185 CPU in it. I think it is installed in an MSI 7125 PCIE with a X1900 card.

Its funny I have a bunch of socket 754 boards (agp), maybe 1 or 2 939's and a shedload of 940 (mostly dual processor in both AGP, PCI-X, and PCIE (some SLI). 939 must not have been out that long.

Jade Falcon wrote:

Opteron ? single cpu?

OK....

Anyway nice looking system! And grate pick on the mobo!

I guess I went for an Opteron because its a little different, obviously alot of these were used in SMP setups

nforce4max wrote:

Nice build! Better now than never before the prices get prohibitive. Going to upgrade the cooling by chance even if it is just for looks?

in regards to the CPU cooler, probably not as it does the job and looks decent(gives me about 40-45C when idle, and about 50C when under load). This is actually the 2nd heatsink Im using since the first was a much cheaper all aluminium one (looked like something you would find with a Sempron OEM machine).

Unknown_K wrote:

My Opteron 939 setup has a 180 or 185 CPU in it. I think it is installed in an MSI 7125 PCIE with a X1900 card.

Its funny I have a bunch of socket 754 boards (agp), maybe 1 or 2 939's and a shedload of 940 (mostly dual processor in both AGP, PCI-X, and PCIE (some SLI). 939 must not have been out that long.

It was certainly sort of an inbetween solution that lasted less than 2 years, cheaper PCs used 754 and professionals would have gone with 940 Opterons.
I also have to wonder how many people simply skipped the Athlon64 era (754/939/940 , not including AM2) entirely. At the time I had an Athlon XP 2100 which lasted until 2007 when I swapped it for a Core2Duo machine

It is nice to see Opterons making their way into the retro builder community. Earlier this year, I retired my dual PIII-S 1.5 GHz in favour of an Opteron 180 (2.4 GHz) system as my daily driver. I was expecting the system to feel loads faster, but was disappointed. From my user perspective, it feels about 2.5x faster with online browsing.

The system has 4 GB of DDR RAM, 2.85 GB of which is usable, uses the ULi chipset and has built-in SATA2, PCI, AGP, PCI-E x16 and PCI-E x1 slots. I installed an HD4350 AGP card because I don't own any PCI-E graphics cards. The board only came with 100 mbit ethernet, so I installed one of those PCI-E x1 cards which have three USB 3.0 ports and one gigabit ethernet port. Board has been re-capped.

Anyone know how the Opteron 180 stacks up against a P4 Prescott 3.0 GHz? The Prescott, which is in an Intel server board, feels faster online.

Here's a comparison of the Opteron 180 vs. an i7-4790. It is about 4x slower.
http://www.cpu-world.com/Compare/976/AMD_Dual … 7_i7-4790K.html

Generally, Dual Core (Opteron 180), will beat Single Core (like Prescott), in system responsiveness (XP/Win7 doesn't matter). If it feels sluggish, it may be driver's fault (bug in code) or HDD/chipset aren't "talking" fast enough to beat Intel's combo in server board.

What HDD/GPU are you using in Prescott build ?

The P4 Prescott is using an Intel S875WP1-E server motherboard, which is based on the 875P chipset. Both boards have 4 GB DDR400 memory. The Intel board has an AGP GeForce 6600 GT and a 7200 RPM SATA2 HDD, but on a SATA1 port. Opteron 180 has a SATA2 HDD on a SATA2 port and HD4350 graphics.

I just ran a Flash-based news stream (CBC - The National), which is pretty demanding, on these systems. Actually, the Opteron 180 performed better, meaning no dropped frames, and could handle the highest HD quality, while the Prescott had an occasional skip, but would auto switch to the middle HD quality. So for this test, the Opteron performed best. Perhaps the HD 4350 helped compared to the 6600 GT though. I'm not sure what I was running in the past which led to my conclusion of the Prescott system feeling more spry. Maybe the Prescott is better at some SSE2/SSE3 activities. Seems like I may have been running some web-based transcoding software with live playback. I recapped the Opteron's MB since those tests though, and it really helped with stability.

Is there a socket 478 CPU for the 875P chipset which will equal the Opteron 180?

feipoa wrote:

It is nice to see Opterons making their way into the retro builder community. Earlier this year, I retired my dual PIII-S 1.5 G […]
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It is nice to see Opterons making their way into the retro builder community. Earlier this year, I retired my dual PIII-S 1.5 GHz in favour of an Opteron 180 (2.4 GHz) system as my daily driver. I was expecting the system to feel loads faster, but was disappointed. From my user perspective, it feels about 2.5x faster with online browsing.

The system has 4 GB of DDR RAM, 2.85 GB of which is usable, uses the ULi chipset and has built-in SATA2, PCI, AGP, PCI-E x16 and PCI-E x1 slots. I installed an HD4350 AGP card because I don't own any PCI-E graphics cards. The board only came with 100 mbit ethernet, so I installed one of those PCI-E x1 cards which have three USB 3.0 ports and one gigabit ethernet port. Board has been re-capped.

Anyone know how the Opteron 180 stacks up against a P4 Prescott 3.0 GHz? The Prescott, which is in an Intel server board, feels faster online.

Here's a comparison of the Opteron 180 vs. an i7-4790. It is about 4x slower.
http://www.cpu-world.com/Compare/976/AMD_Dual … 7_i7-4790K.html

I'd blame the motherboard. I've never trusted those weird, do-everything Frankenmobos. I had C2D E6600 (2.4GHz/1066/4MB) in one of those ASRock AGP/PCIE boards, and that motherboard absolutely killed its performance. AGP and PCIe bus bandwidth were way behind Intel and nVidia chipsets. In fact, my laptop, based on a C2D T5600 (1.83GHz/667/2MB) managed to outperform it in some benchmarks (software video decoding, A/V encoding and synthetic memory bandwidth were some of the tests I remember being very surprised at).

The Opteron at 2.4 should run circles around a 3GHz P4. I have one of those Opterons myself--it's a 185 overclocked to 3GHz running on a A8N32-SLI board. It handily outperforms my 4GHZ Pentium D 935 at everything.

The Athlon 64/Opteron was such a big deal because AMD put the memory controller inside the CPU. Its also the reason they jumped to AM2 socket when DDR2 came out.

Unknown_K wrote:

The Athlon 64/Opteron was such a big deal because AMD put the memory controller inside the CPU. Its also the reason they jumped to AM2 socket when DDR2 came out.

Isn't that what Cyrix did with the MediaGX?

Standard Def Steve wrote:

The Opteron at 2.4 should run circles around a 3GHz P4. I have one of those Opterons myself--it's a 185 overclocked to 3GHz running on a A8N32-SLI board. It handily outperforms my 4GHZ Pentium D 935 at everything.

I ran the PCMark05 benchmark on these 3 systems,

Opteron 180 (2.4 GHz)
4GB DDR400
ASRock 939Dual-SATA2
ULi M1695/M1567 chipset
ATI HD4350 AGP w/Catalyst v14.4
SATA2

i875P-Prescott 3 GHz
4GB DDR400
Intel S875WP1-E
Intel 875P chipset
GeForce 6600GT AGP w/Forceware v169.21
SATA1

i915GL-Prescott 3 GHz
4GB DDR400
Acer Aspire T670
Intel 915GL chipset
ATI Radeon X550 EZ PCI-E
SATA1

PCMark05 wanted me to change my visual settings, which I did not want to do. For this reason, I do not have a PCMark or Graphics score due to not being able to run the transparent windows benchmark.

CPU score
Opteron180 = 4862
i875-Prescott = 3710
i915-Prescott = 3785

Memory score
Opteron180 = 3803
i875-Prescott = 3908
i915-Prescott = 3685

Hard drive score
Opteron180 = 7621
i875-Prescott = 4658
i915-Prescott = 5102

2D Video playback
Opteron180 = 24.9 fps
i875-Prescott = 35.1 fps
i915-Prescott = 31.9 fps

2D graphics memory 128 lines
Opteron180 = 522 fps
i875-Prescott = 754 fps
i915-Prescott = 219 fps

The scores indicate that the Opteron 180 is the faster CPU by 30%. The SATA2 controller on the Opteron system really helped the HDD score, above that of the i875 by around 60%. The memory throughput on the i875 was the fastest, but not by much.

The result which I find interesting, and is likely related to my experience with online videos, is the video playback score. Why does the Opteron180 score only 24.9 fps, whereas the i875 system scores 35.1 fps?

feipoa wrote:

The scores indicate that the Opteron 180 is the faster CPU by 30%. The SATA2 controller on the Opteron system really helped the HDD score, above that of the i875 by around 60%. The memory throughput on the i875 was the fastest, but not by much.

The result which I find interesting, and is likely related to my experience with online videos, is the video playback score. Why does the Opteron180 score only 24.9 fps, whereas the i875 system scores 35.1 fps?

You're probably running into the same "problem" I had with my ASRock PCIe/AGP Core 2 motherboard: poor video performance thanks to poor AGP/PCIe bus performance. As I said in the previous post, my 1.83GHz laptop managed to outperform the 2.4GHz E6600 desktop in software video decoding.

It's best to use a motherboard that has a proper AGP-only or PCIe-only chipset.

You may also want to test the Opteron system with your 6600GT AGP and/or X300 PCI-E cards. IIRC the AGP Radeon HD2000-4000 boards weren't exactly the most system friendly cards.

EDIT:

PCMark05 wanted me to change my visual settings, which I did not want to do. For this reason, I do not have a PCMark or Graphics score due to not being able to run the transparent windows benchmark.

Wait, so you have desktop composition disabled? That's probably what's killing your video performance! The Basic and Classic themes in Windows 7 actually hurt performance because they disable desktop composition. You can leave the transparency effects off if you'd like, but at least have desktop composition enabled. It's a must if you want decent video playback, especially through a web browser.

I am using Windows XP SP3 w/POS2009 updates for testing. Is there a Desktop Composition setting for XP? I have everything set to Classic desktop and disable all the bling with transition effects and so forth. I find them unnecessary and a bit irritating. All systems benchmarked have the same settings in this regard, so it does not explain the benchmark score differences.

I will pull the PCI-E card from the i915 system and put it in the ASRock. I forgot I had that card as that system is in the garage and serves as my mechanic computer. Do you think Catalyst v10.2 performs better than 14.4?

I did quite a bit of research before deciding to use this ASRock motherboard. It was mentioned that it was one of the few which actually got the PCI-E + AGP implementation right.

After installing the ATI X550 EZ PCI-E card into the Opteron 180 system, the 2D Video playback went from 24.9 fps (HD4350 AGP) to 43.6 fps (X550 PCI-E). Recall it was 31.9 fps on the i915-Prescott 3GHz system w/X550. 2D Graphics memory went from 522 fps (HD4350 AGP) to 292 fps (X550). Recall that it was 219 fps on the i915-Prescott 3GHz system w/X550.

I'm not sure what conclusions can be drawn from this information except that the Opteron 180 system is a good deal faster than i915/i875 systems w/Prescott 3 GHz. Perhaps that 2D Video playback on the HD4350 isn't very good? Is this the benchmark which is responsible for viewing FLASH and HTML5 content in web browsers? If so, should I change the graphics card? To what? Ideally, I'd like to stick with AGP graphics to leave the PCI-E slot open for future, non-graphics, expansion cards.

Never install latest AMD drivers for ATI card while using old Windows.
You should try Catalyst 10.2 or 9.1-9.3 versions.

PS. I think ASRock boards for LGA 775 are OK in AGP/PCI-e department : LINK 😀