feipoa wrote:

Standard Def Steve, you mentioned that you are dual booting XP and Win7. Are you using a boot manager, or is the Win7 installation smart enough to use its own boot manager? I haven't played with Win7 much, so I'm a bit of a novice here. I might dual boot XP and Win10 to help ease out XP. I'd prefer Win7, but extended support ends Jan 2020, so might not be worth the effort to setup. Unless there is an XP/POS2009 like fix to keep updates going on Win7?

Looks like my Opteron cooler has just shipped. That took awhile!

Yeah, Win7 automatically creates a boot menu when it sees an XP partition.
I don't recommend running Win10 on a socket 939 system for two reasons:

-The CPUs don't support the 64-bit version, and IMO starting with Vista, Windows was meant for x64.
-Win10 uses more of everything. More RAM, higher disk and CPU overhead, etc. It will feel slower than Win7 on an old s939 system with, at most, ~3.4GB of usable memory.

So, if you really must use a s939 system as your main for as long as possible, I'd recommend Win7 x64 until support ends, then make the switch to new hardware and Win10.

I'm using the Wraith Max to cool my Opty 180, works quite well 🤣

Opteron 100 series and Athlon 64 x2 do not support 64-bit OSes? How does one determine this?

Opteron 100 series and Athlon 64 x2 do not support 64-bit OSes?

They don't support WIn10 64-bit.

The Serpent Rider wrote:

Opteron 100 series and Athlon 64 x2 do not support 64-bit OSes?

They don't support WIn10 64-bit.

And 8.1 x64 : LINK.
Unless you can put AM2 CPU on S939 board, you can't have Win8.1/10 64-bit OS on it.

Win 8.1/10 x64 requires :
1) CMPXCHG16b or "CompareExchange 128"
2) LAHF/SAHF 64-bit version
3) PrefetchW instruction.
You can check support using CoreInfo (or AIDA64).

Notes :
Ad. 1. Not supported by rev. E6 and earlier K8 CPU.
Ad. 2. Not supported by Prescott "E0"/Prescott-2M "N0", and Smithfield "A0" (redundant).
Ad. 3. Not supported by 90nm and older Netburst Intel CPUs.

I ran my old Venice clocked at 3200/3400+ with a Thermaltake Sonic Tower. The only 2 fans were 2x80mm exhaust.
With a fan I'm sure it could handle 120W.

The original AMD copper based heat pipe cooler is indeed utter crap. It spins up&down like crazy even on a 955. It's fine on 65W CPUs. Wraith could have come a lot earlier and would have saved us all lots of $.

And 8.1 x64

Luckily nobody cares about this abomination.

OK, so the options for the Opteron 185 are Win7 64-bit, Win7 32-bit, or Win10 32-bit? Or if using an AM2 upgrade card, Win10 64-bit?

Windows 8.0 x64 should work as well (only 8.1 x64 requires that additional stuff).
AM2 upgrade card is for some ASRock boards only (I think...).

The Serpent Rider wrote:

And 8.1 x64

Luckily nobody cares about this abomination.

Actually, 8.0 is the primary abomination. 8.1 rolled back some of the main mistakes and made it almost tolerable. i still wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole, but 8.0 is the worst offender. Windows 8 and 8.1 are to windows 7 or even 10 what ME is to 98. You technically can use it, but why would you?

8.1 is pretty solid, I've never experienced any issues with it. Just use Classic Shell to get rid of the tiled start menu and it is like an enhanced version of Windows 7.

Any way to get 8.0 to look like 8.1 and to run as solid?

8.0 stopped receiving security updates several years ago. Win7, 8.1, and 10 are the three currently supported versions.

I recently bought modern arctic freezer 13 cooler for my FX-60. It seems to be keeping it very cool.

Baoran wrote:

I recently bought modern arctic freezer 13 cooler for my FX-60. It seems to be keeping it very cool.

Claims to be 24 dBA. Is that when the fan is running at full speed? If so, seems like a nice system. Assuming your graphics card does not accelerate or decode youtube videos, could you play a 1080p or larger Youtube video on full screen for 10 minutes and watch the CPU temperature? What is the max CPU temperature under this condition?

Standard Def Steve wrote:

8.0 stopped receiving security updates several years ago. Win7, 8.1, and 10 are the three currently supported versions.

Ok. Is there really anything wrong with 32-bit Win 8.1 or 32-bit Win 10? I'm not really excited about the idea of upgrading Win7 64-bit in a little over 1 year, or having to hunt down the best AM2 CPU which will work in my ASRock's AM2 CPU upgrade card to enable Win10 64-bit. The latter approach would also require finding another heatsink/CPU combo that is low(ish) profile to mount horizontally on these ASRocks cards. Anyone know what is the best AM2 to work in these cards? I remember reading a few years back that AM2's weren't much faster than an Opteron 185. I also think I'd need new RAM for the ASRock card.

Why even bother? If it's your main system, there's vastly better options to upgrade for a similar price. And it's not exactly good for a modern use anyway, so Win7 will be just as fine even 5 years from now.

feipoa wrote:

Baoran wrote:

I recently bought modern arctic freezer 13 cooler for my FX-60. It seems to be keeping it very cool.

Claims to be 24 dBA. Is that when the fan is running at full speed? If so, seems like a nice system. Assuming your graphics card does not accelerate or decode youtube videos, could you play a 1080p or larger Youtube video on full screen for 10 minutes and watch the CPU temperature? What is the max CPU temperature under this condition?

I have not tested youtube videos because I am not planning to connect it to internet. Just having it as win98/winxp dual boot gaming pc. I did run Prime95 to test with max cpu load and temperature always stayed below 50C.

feipoa wrote:

Standard Def Steve wrote:

8.0 stopped receiving security updates several years ago. Win7, 8.1, and 10 are the three currently supported versions.

Ok. Is there really anything wrong with 32-bit Win 8.1 or 32-bit Win 10? I'm not really excited about the idea of upgrading Win7 64-bit in a little over 1 year, or having to hunt down the best AM2 CPU which will work in my ASRock's AM2 CPU upgrade card to enable Win10 64-bit. The latter approach would also require finding another heatsink/CPU combo that is low(ish) profile to mount horizontally on these ASRocks cards. Anyone know what is the best AM2 to work in these cards? I remember reading a few years back that AM2's weren't much faster than an Opteron 185. I also think I'd need new RAM for the ASRock card.

32bit windows is realistically on the way out. For a few years now there is software that doesn't come as a 32bit version any longer, particularly newer games to the point that 32bit windows is useless for a modern gaming machine. Granted; this is likely not relevant here, but it IS where this is going. Nvidia has a few months ago stopped supporting 32bit windows alltogether so the drivers are likely to be stuck at the versions from a few months ago. You can expect more hardware manufacturers to follow suit.

The main "downside" of 64 bit windows or advantage of 32bit is that 64 bit windows did away with the support for 16bit code. The only time I ran into this as an issue were old late 90s game installers that tend to be 16bit programs. That is something to be aware of if you use a lot of old (and I mean REALLY old) windows programs. In my experience it is not an issue unless it is some exotic piece of software that vital for someones business but is long out of production, hasn't seen support in decades and nobody knows how exactly it works.

Once you install Linux, you don't care what M$ supports and what not. A dual core Opty with 8Gb of RAM can handle all common everyday tasks.