Buy the opteron 165.

They have been relatively high for years. Don't think they had a "low" point since Phenom II was out. However last time I thought "That's expensive for nothing" they were "only" $150. Anyway, I've got an X2 for my 939 so I am not really bothered.

But, I think they were "halo" CPU around the time impressionable young millennials had no cash at all, and now some of them do.

Edit: might also be the reason for that other thread complaining about how hard to find or expensive high speed and capacity DDR is.

I was looking for one for the last few years as they were Halo products, I dont think they ever sold in high numbers so they have been hard to find for quite a while.

Yeah I guess I'll just be skipping 939, I have many other PCs so it's not a big deal, I'm just very Intel heavy and wanted to mix it up a little bit. Oh well. Maybe I'll get lucky on a marketplace post or something. I'll just keep my eyes peeled.

The main stumbling point of s939 is availability of fast X2 CPUs. Anything above 2.4ghz is going to be very expensive. You first get the CPU cheap with a lucky find, only then get a motherboard, not vice versa.

We have a topic dedicated to s939 Battle of the platforms: socket 939! , but due to CPU prices it is impractical to most people.

AM2 has been tested in Any love for AM2? , buy 3-3.2Ghz Windsor X2. Buy AM2+ motherboard just in case you find out Windsor isn't enough for you.

Normal going prices for those are insane.

I do understand why they are that high though. Kind of makes me want to sell some of my higher end CPUs.

This is all just my take, but here is why I feel high end Socket 939 chips are exceptionally expensive these days:

Socket 939 was an extremely short lived platform. The vast majority of the CPUs released for it came out within one year from June of 2004 to June of 2005, with a few assorted high end dual core FX models released within a year or so after that. AM2 was already out in mid 2006, along with DDR2, and at this same time Intel was turning the CPU market upside down with Conroe.

This was also not a great time for system longevity since it was at the tail end of the capacitor plague. I'm sure a decent portion of Socket 939 systems were junked either due to boards having bad caps (slightly less common since they tended to use better caps by this point) or being in systems with dead PSUs.

Then, throw in all of the rather huge changes going on in the market at this time:

The start of Intel's 10 year stranglehold on the CPU market
The end of the Windows XP 32bit era as the high end enthusiast OS and the start of Vista and 64bit
With that the end of hardware accelerated DirectSound3D (and basically the entire gaming soundcard market)
The end of Direct3D 9 as the latest thing; the start of DirectX 10 and unified shaders
The end of AGP slots and DDR1 on the vast majority of boards

So, what you end up with are high-end halo products released at a pivotal time for the PC enthusiast\gaming industry on a platform that feels more connected to the previous "era". The performance of the halo products was also left in the dust by Core 2 within months, so it made little sense for the relatively niche group of enthusiast 939 users out there to try to upgrade to FX series as soon as we saw what Intel had pulled off. This is made even worse by the fact that the performance difference between the slowest Athlon 64 X2 and the fastest FX was relatively small, and they didn't overclock well (unlike Core 2).

All that means they are now quite rare, and yet all of those "previous era" things that made them less desirable at the time now make them stand out as a product from a bygone era. There is also, likely, a decent amount of interest in building the fastest ye olde gaming PC to see what it can run today, with DDR1 and AGP, or DirectX 9 class GPUs in SLI.

Finally, lots of people that were poor teenagers back then are now in their late 30s and 40s and have more than enough disposable income to build the system they wanted in 2005-2006.

tl;dr : Extremely small supply + multiple reasons to be of interest = high demand vs supply. High demand vs supply + high spending budgets = high prices.

Nearly two years ago now I bought a lot of 939 motherboards and an FX-57 was included. Thought it runs fine at stock speed, it runs hot and I'm convinced that it need to be decapped and have the TIM replaced as is typical of 939 CPUs. But that seems like a crazy chance to take with such a CPU. I stuck with my Opteron 180.

AlexZ wrote on Yesterday, 19:26:

AM2 has been tested in Any love for AM2? , buy 3-3.2Ghz Windsor X2. Buy AM2+ motherboard just in case you find out Windsor isn't enough for you.

This is where I'm at now. Other than my socket 7 and A systems, I'll just stick with AM2 and up since those are reasonable. I don't need bragging rights to tell people "I have a socket 939 computer," I was just genuinely shocked at the price of otherwise non remarkable CPUs.

Those socket 939 FX CPUs were ludicrously priced when new. They also had a reputation of running hot. I went for a cheap used Opteron instead of a Athlon FX when I upgraded my socket 939 system in 2008. I could live with the unsupported CPU BIOS message.

S939, single core common and cheap, dual core rare and expensive, similar dual core on AM2 is way cheaper, there were single, but dual pretty much became standard