So, it seems like there isn't any love for AM2..........

Hoping wrote on 2023-01-26, 21:32:

So, it seems like there isn't any love for AM2..........

IMHO it wasn't outstanding, didn't bring much to the plate apart from DDR2.
If you want to build a system there is much better to look for.

I made a X2 5000+ for my father and he remembers it fondly as it was a big bump from what he had, he has some love for it.

In a parallel timeline where Intel screwed up Conroe, it was the best thing of the later noughties. In this one, it was a Toyota Corolla, competent car, but there was racier, plusher, comfier cars if you could afford them. You're maybe prone to loving it if it got you through those years, or you hate Intel on principle. I've got 'em because I've got 'em, bang per buck was high, maybe you could have bought the Pentium Dual Core version of the Intel for money close to your X2, and rely on overclocking it to insane speeds, but to do that you had to spend 3x as much on the motherboard and get some top shelf RAM.

edit: I think in effect also there was some "AMD enthusiast lag" on the new platform, with 939 and 940 still being seen as the "serious" platforms, and enthusiasts had a lot of money sunk in those, and were clocking X2 and Opteron to 3Ghz. AM2 might have been seen as the 754 replacement, the mass market office box platform. So for a year or two until higher Mhz CPU debuted, there might have been reluctance to jump... well some of that is normal, I mean even from the people who didn't care about the money. By the time the platform got some kind of mass and momentum, the ppl who were only on 939 and 940 because it was the best, were jumping ship to intel.

Back in the day, I went from a s939 X2 3800 @2.4ghz to a s775 e4300 @ 3.0 and the difference was astounding. I think I recall the Conroe roughly doubling the performance of the Windsor for me.

Hoping wrote on 2023-01-26, 21:32:

So, it seems like there isn't any love for AM2..........

I DO love socket AM2; it provides a very good platform for XP, Vista and 7. They all feel very snappy on it; of course socket 775 with core 2 duo steals the limelight but I did not encountered any period correct games that are limited by the platform - they are all limited by the GPU.
I have all Abit AM2 boards and I have several builds on socket AM2. The performance is very good but of course socket 775 provides better performance IF you use period incorrect video cards otherwise everything is identical.

douglar wrote on 2023-01-22, 15:27:

What operating systems do you put on your AM2 builds? […]
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What operating systems do you put on your AM2 builds?

Windows XP because my Athlon X2 6000+ would have really been something if it came out a year earlier
Windows Vista because I want a quirky OS to go with my peculiar hardware
Windows 7 because I already upgraded the RAM and now I want trim support for my SSD
Windows 8.1 because kinky bondage like user interfaces are my thing
Windows 10 because my Phenom II X4 is still a legit CPU, damn it!
Linux, because I’ve got an Sempron-LE that still works as a router

It all depends on what CPU and how much ram you have!
I have several builds; here is one of them:
1. athlon 64 x2 6000 Windsor 89W TDP with 2mb of cache an NOT Brisbane that has 1mb of L2 cache and has lower performance despite the higher clock speed!
2. 8gb of Corsair ram that runs at DDR-733 from what I remember because of the peculiarities of the memory controller!
3. Abit fatality AN9 32x
4. geforce 8800gtx
5. 480gb kingston SSD
6. CM hyper 212 cooler that is extremely quiet
7. Windows 7 because of the period incorrect SSD
8. corsair tx850m bought new that is dead silent
Performance is good but not great, 8800gtx is always the bottleneck. Even period correct games can not run at max settings because of the video card, later ones are out of the question.

I loved AM2/+, haters be damned. I ran it with an Athlon64 X2 3800+ and Radeon HD2600PRO, Athlon X2 5000+ with a Radeon HD3850 and Athlon II X4 640 with a Radeon HD4850 for many many years on my Biostar TA760G motherboard, which still runs with an Athlon II X3 CPU as a media player to this day. I eventually moved on to AM3 with my Athlon II X4 640 and a Radeon HD770, then to AM3+ with an FX 8300 with an Radeon RX480.

I believe I used Windows XP in the early years of the platform, never touched Vista, but I moved on to Windows 7 as soon as public betas were available.

I never regretted these hardware decisions. I knew I was leaving money on the table compared to Intel CPUs at the time but I was never going to buy products from a fucking anti-consumer anti-competitive douchebag shitshow of a company like Intel, so I had made my peace with that.

appiah4 wrote on 2023-01-27, 06:21:

I knew I was leaving money on the table compared to Intel CPUs at the time but I was never going to buy products from a fucking anti-consumer anti-competitive douchebag shitshow of a company like Intel, so I had made my peace with that.

Have you ever considered writing retail advertising copy? This would have been an amazing full page advertisement in Infoworld magazine!

AMD is not your friend though and will happily scam too, if they'll have opportunity. AM2 was very obviously dead on arrival and only few manufacturers had decent support for it.

Most current to the times AM2 I had was/is a 5400 on NF400 ECS board, think I ran it at 2.6Ghz mostly, 4GB RAM, some weird selections of GPU swapped in and out 7300GT, 9600GT, HD4650. Now my monitors are never up to the minute or very spendy so resolutions weren't much more than 1024x768 or 13xx by whatev.. I wasn't super into gaming for that period, I had always been a bargain bin, or gold release type gamer, and by then budget rereleases had practically ceased to exist at retail, so never ran all that much. Initially, I was just excited that I could run stuff on the 7300GT and playing 2 year old things was doable. Then I got the 9600GT and of course it was faster and a decent amount ran on that at my resolutions and lack of caring about ultimate eye candy. Then the HD4650 came along, still a couple of years behind the curve and that was kind of amazing what that little card could do until it ran out of DX, but yeah, didn't really find I was straining the CPU much, where it left me wanting was in media conversion and that kind of heavy duty load. Actually got effectively "downgraded" as far as FPS was concerned but "upgraded" for conversion work with a HD6450 which has some codec crunching support.

Anyway, the faster X2s, it feels like you can game as high as their SSE support permits, backed up with upper mid to top end GPU appropriate to DX level 10 or 11. Other folks can probably find an example of a CPU crusher they aren't ideal on.

However, since there's not a lot of straight AM2 around that can't effectively be made into 2+ with BIOS and a lot of 2+ native, it's hard to resist piling on the CPU to 4 and 6 core Phenom IIs and getting something not far off modern budget rig pace, as long as SSE4a is enough. You suffer a 5-10% penalty over using said CPU in an AM3+ board, but with one of those you might cram in an FX bully or so and play some little newer stuff too.

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2023-01-27, 14:19:

AMD is not your friend though and will happily scam too, if they'll have opportunity. AM2 was very obviously dead on arrival and only few manufacturers had decent support for it.

QFT, first duty is to shareholders and they can basically get sued by them for not milking the customer for all they're worth, so don't invest too much faith in any company.

In the end, it all depends on points of view, personal circumstances, and coincidences.
I was surprised that no one said they had good memories or experiences of AM2, just as I am surprised that there are people who have good memories or experiences of Pentium 4.
In my case, I have had more satisfactory experiences with AM2 than with 775, luck has wanted reliability and stability to be the priority, and I have had a lot of bad luck with 775.
With AM2 I have had far fewer issues despite poor performance, and most importantly, the issues were easier to identify and resolve.
That's my experience, and it doesn't have to be everyone's.
Again, I'm not an AMD famboy or anything, I also have Intel based computers, both laptops and desktops.

Standard Def Steve wrote on 2023-01-24, 19:13:

The memory latency was really quite dreadful on my AM2 system. I had always wondered if the GeForce 6150 iGPU had anything to do with it, or perhaps the way it was plumbed in to the memory bus. I remember it being really slow for Windows Aero. Like, even worse than Intel GMA 3000 somehow.

As others have already said, AM2+ and Phenom II is where things start to get fun.

The IGP has to communicate thru the HT bus and then the CPU to RAM. Prior to AM2+ and HT3 that is very slow. Or if you run a HT2 CPU on a AM2+ board. Even in the best case it is slower than what an Intel IGP had access to being in the same chip as the memory controller.

It was even worse with early 754/939 platforms. I think those CPUs had a bug or just weren't tuned well for external devices trying to access RAM.

swaaye wrote on 2023-01-27, 17:19:

Standard Def Steve wrote on 2023-01-24, 19:13:

The memory latency was really quite dreadful on my AM2 system. I had always wondered if the GeForce 6150 iGPU had anything to do with it, or perhaps the way it was plumbed in to the memory bus. I remember it being really slow for Windows Aero. Like, even worse than Intel GMA 3000 somehow.

As others have already said, AM2+ and Phenom II is where things start to get fun.

The IGP has to communicate thru the HT bus and then the CPU to RAM. Prior to AM2+ and HT3 that is very slow. Or if you run a HT2 CPU on a AM2+ board. Even in the best case it is slower than what an Intel IGP had access to being in the same chip as the memory controller.

It was even worse with early 754/939 platforms. I think those CPUs had a bug or just weren't tuned well for external devices trying to access RAM.

I can't say I saw much of a change from s754 6100 to AM2 s754 behavior, but yeah, messing with memory clock or channels had a far less visible impact than a direct clock change in Hyper Transport for performance, it was clearly a big bottleneck,
but I mean the 6100 itself was very weak (I think we are talking 2 pipelines as opposed to the 4 of the 6200 or worse), still when I overclocked it from 425 to 600Mhz the gain was far from impressive because HT was a big bottleneck.

I had a notebook with 754 Turion at 1.8Ghz, about 3000+ in AMD64 terms, and that with it's onboard Radeon Express X300 graphics was performing at high end P4 and 9600SE type frames. The "6150" on the NF400 board also seemed to turn in performance of a discrete 6200 of the budgetty-est budget variety, I didn't really see where there was a performance gap between those onboard GPU and their nearest discrete equivalent. Either of them seemed way better than any intel onboard up to HD2000. .... and if you're gonna tell me prior Intel graphics get higher 3D marks, Watch. The. Damn. Game. Tests. they egregiously skip frames, you can practically hand count the frames they actually render while claiming 30fps in the corner.

edit: Okay, figured it out, GMA3000 has no vertex shaders which Aero doesn't use heavy, but needs speedy pixel shaders, which are higher speed on a GMA3000 and potentially twice as many depending on version of ATi/nVid integrated. So while it falls on it face hard for games unless used with the highest speed CPUs, the pixel shader performance may make it snappier for Aero, while hardware vertex shaders in the other onboard do better in games.

Nvidia's chipsets were a big problem for AM2 because of their unreliability, and their IGP performance was even worse than their reliability.
But, I think this was normal because AMD bought ATI in 2006 and released the AM2 socket that same year, these chipsets were an opportunity for Nvidia to harm its competition, since for the public the problem was only AMD. I remember how when an AM2 motherboard with Nvidia chipset died from bumpgate it was always AMD's fault because it was low quality. But most reviewers already noted the very high temperatures of the Nvidia chipsets.
No one in the public found out about the bumpgate case.
I myself did not find out about the bumgate problem until 2009, having suffered quite a few losses from it.
I would imagine that Nvidia chipsets were quite a bit cheaper than ATI/AMD ones because they were much more common and at the lower end they were almost ubiquitous.

Hoping wrote on 2023-01-27, 17:06:

In the end, it all depends on points of view, personal circumstances, and coincidences. I was surprised that no one said they ha […]
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In the end, it all depends on points of view, personal circumstances, and coincidences.
I was surprised that no one said they had good memories or experiences of AM2, just as I am surprised that there are people who have good memories or experiences of Pentium 4.
In my case, I have had more satisfactory experiences with AM2 than with 775, luck has wanted reliability and stability to be the priority, and I have had a lot of bad luck with 775.
With AM2 I have had far fewer issues despite poor performance, and most importantly, the issues were easier to identify and resolve.
That's my experience, and it doesn't have to be everyone's.
Again, I'm not an AMD famboy or anything, I also have Intel based computers, both laptops and desktops.

A friend of mine actually has more AM2 experience than me as he build 1 or 2 AM2 LAN rigs both of us used fairly extensively.
It was a A64 2x 6000+ iirc.
I only had the Sempron (iirc) single core on AM2 with spare parts. It ran everything well except BF2 which, unfortunately for that rig, was basically he purpose I build it.
It always wanted to bluescreen when playing BF2 and I never figured out what the issue was. All other games seemed to run fine.

I ended up lending the system to a friend where it disappeared from my radar for years. I eventually got it back years later (in non-working condition) but I did get all his other old parts which included a Chieftec Dragon case I really wanted 😀

And that was it! Not much to tell about AM2 from my perspective 😜

I got several of the AM2 predecessor socketed systems and several of its successors, but AM2 I mostly skipped.

I wouldn't say I dislike it. I even mentioned I'd still want to revisit the AM2 platform at some point, but it would probably be for a WinXP rig if I end up building it.

AM2 covers a wide range of processors from single core to quad cores that can fit many needs! The iGPU in the chipsets are very weak for reasons mentioned by swaaye and BitWrangler - even for basic tasks - when using modern operating systems!
Example 2: Phenom 9750 95w, 4*2gb Corsair, Abit AN78GS/A-N78HD, 480gb Kingston with Windows 7 installed because of the SSD. Aero effects such as Windows key-tab seem slow, 3d screen savers the same. With XP everything is crazy fast. Installed a geforce 9800gtx+ and the interface became fluid and responsive.
I like AM2 and it fits perfectly in the Windows XP era, right at the end of it or in the beginning of the Vista/7 era.

Interesting tidbit: the Radeon HD 3xxx IGP drivers didn't support GUI acceleration with XP. You could get high resolution and color depth but extremely slow. I don't know if they ever bothered to implement it.

I liked the GeForce 8200/8300 chipsets best. Nvidia finally added AHCI support. Their Gb NIC was pretty refined at this point too. The ASUS board I have works with 4GB DIMMs.

The 3 780G boards I've used were problematic. ASUS and Gigabyte. The IGP seems to cause BSODs, if rather rarely. I never could figure it out. Different drivers, memory testing, cooling the northbridge, etc. And the AMD southbridge is pretty lame overall. Poor SATA and USB performance.

I have also used some AM2 boards. GeForce 6150 seemed ok but they are likely to die from solder failure I think. They have some SATA errata and have NCQ disabled because of that AFAIK. They are nforce4 related and yeah nforce4 was cool but troublesome.

The worst thing about AMD chipsets for AM2, I think it was the south bridge, the SATA interface always seemed slower to me than Intel chipsets, making the whole system seem slower, at the time the only solution I found was to use RAID 0 until SSDs became common and "affordable".
But it didn't surprise me either since I started using RAID 0 with an A7N8X deluxe and I could never stop using it until the advent of SSDs.

With an SSD, I can't find a difference between the AMD, Nvidia or Intel chipsets of the time, it may be seen in benchmarks, but I don't notice the difference that I did at the time.

I'm having a hard time deciding to finishing piecing together my AM2 build or to move ahead with a Sandy Bridge system I have laying around for Windows XP. The Sandy is on a Z77 ITX board while the AM2 is on what I believe is a Tyan manufactured Sun Microsystems board with what I think is nforce4 or similar. Lots of room for expansion there.