58 & 59 & 60. We reach the last year of the XP era: 2006. Thinking about it I wonder wherever a Vista era existed because XP remained the dominant OS up until Windows 7!
The first game is Prey. Built on IDTECH4 engine it is much easier to run than Quake 4. It fully utilizes 2 cores - 70-90% during gameplay - however the killer setting, anti-aliasing, can only be set at 4X maximum. This means GTX 285 has a much easier task this time around so we are not GPU bottle-necked but we are CPU-limited!
Again a good pci-express implementation is mandatory when you want high performance - you may see where this is going!
I used HardwareOC benchmark tool again and tested using the first demo. It does not use sound. Retested just this morning to confirm the first 2 series of results.

Prey - 2006
A. nforce4
B. K8T890

NVIDIA takes no prisoners and kills off VIA in Prey! I would say a pattern emerges: in opengl games based on IDTECH4 nforce4 is far in front while in Directx9 games is equal to K8T890.
This games is very easy to run on any socket 939 system as long as you got a good video card: GTS 250 1gb recommended.

61. I specifically selected Company of heroes to prove a point: games that bring a specific era system to its knees are not first/third person shooters but RTS/simulation games. Just like Age of empires II is unplayable on any CPU released where the game was released such as Pentium 3/Athlon Thunderbird Company of heroes proves to be very tough on the poor Athlon 64 X2 4800. The game utilizes both cores to about 70-80%; as more and more units are produced the processor is overwhelmed and the frame-rate drops dramatically.
I tested using the builtin benchmark which is NOT representative of the gameplay and is more of a graphic card test; everything is already calculated for every single unit. During actual game the CPU will calculate all movements, hit detection, etc for every single unit - that makes the game so difficult for the Athlon.

1024*768
A. nforce4
B. K8T890

1280*1024
A. nforce4
B. K8T890

1600*1200
A. nforce4
B. K8T890

There is 2-3% better performance on nforce4 - nothing to write home about!

64. And the last game tested is Microsoft Flight simulator X - original release from 2006 upgraded with SP1 & SP2. Again specifically chosen to demonstrate that 2006 is really the end of the road for socket 939!
The game is simply destroying the Athlon 64 X2 - it does not matter if you got FX-60 you will not be able to play this game at maximum details. Please note that maximum details are FAR beyond the ultra quality found on the main settings screen. I detailed exactly what maximum means in this post: Re: Battle of the platforms: socket 939!
With the plane flying just above ground level both cores stay at 100% so it is dual core aware. I have chosen the free flight with the Air Creation Trike Ultralight on Friday harbor for testing. I let the game load; waited 1 minute before pressing F11 to test with FRAPS; I did not touched the controls, the plane flew in a straight line, no right or left, no up or down.

1024*768
A. nforce4
Frames, Time (ms), Min, Max, Avg
801, 60000, 11, 15, 13.358

B. K8T890
Frames, Time (ms), Min, Max, Avg
901, 60000, 12, 18, 15.014

1280*1024
A. nforce4
Frames, Time (ms), Min, Max, Avg
780, 60000, 11, 14, 13.008

B.K8T890
Frames, Time (ms), Min, Max, Avg
854, 60000, 11, 16, 14.235

1600*1200
A. nforce4
Frames, Time (ms), Min, Max, Avg
742, 60000, 10, 14, 12.378

B. K8T890
Frames, Time (ms), Min, Max, Avg
716, 60000, 8, 17, 11.933

And here is the one and only victory for VIA: it manages to best nforce4 by 12% at 1024*768 and by 9% at 1280*1024; meanwhile NVIDIA comes back on top at 1600*1200 with a small 3% lead.
It feels like a hollow victory, nobody is going to play FSX on a socket 939 system, but, still, a win it's a win.

While some of you might think: but i can play at 15 FPS - be aware that this results are from a level flight. The moment you want to land and come closer to the ground both CPU cores spike at 100% and the frame-rate plummets into the single digits! I con no longer control the plane despite using a genius F31 joystick at 5 FPS!