A man after my own heart! I love the period specific case! The first gen opties were MONSTERS and were P4 killers. I remember wishing I had one.

Best in socket is an optie 185 or if you want to dabble in overclocking, an FX-60, and I think a 4800+ will fit as well...

The only thing you could do "better" is get a dual socket, but you should at least put another gig of ram in this beast!

I had an Opty165 on a DFI NF4 Ultra D. It would only do about 2.6. I killed that $300 CPU when trying to remove the IHS. Oops. I then got a lowly X2 3800+ that went to around 2.8. The Opterons were a little overrated IMO because that extra cache does very little for ya.

Actually in retrospect I think I should have kept my 2.4ghz Barton setup and held out for Core 2 because it totally destroyed K8. 😀 Core 2 was relatively faster than K8 than K8 was P4.

My 939 box is still out there running, sold to somebody's neighbor.

Yeah everything looks pretty good other then the ram count. You could add a couple of 256 or 512 sticks in there just to polish it off. As is, the current cpu could drive the two 6600 cards fine really I bet as far as SLI is concerned. A faster cpu would help, but then again, any faster dual core cpu would be bottlenecked by the two 6600 cards. You could always go for a pair of 6800 cards. They are dirt cheap on ebay these days. I really do like the look of that case btw.

I had to think hard about what cards I wanted this rig to run, finally I setlled on 2 6600GTs cause this is the pioneer SLI platform and it should run the very first SLI cards. 😀 Also, cause I had the 6600GTs on hand so nothing beats free 😉 ! Maybe later I might swap them out for something else- 6800/7600/7900s.

And the ram, yeah, I'll have a look into that and get another gig in there.

Re the CPU, TBH my old 3000+ is perfectly adequate for this build and what it's meant for, i.e. running the above GPU types and playing games from 04-05 only. After all, it's what I used back when with only ONE 6600GT.

But while building this rig I thought of a few other CPU choices which I would have never bought in 05-06 due to their originally prohibitive cost. of course the Opteron came to the top of my mine as did the ol' FX single core, as did the bang-for-buck dual core 3800+ x2. Gotta admit though, having an Opteron or FX case badge is just waaaaay cool. What goes in finally will depend on what I can get from egay at a non-stupid price.

I have to say, building and playing with this system just transports me back to those happy days of 2005-6, when s939s were king of the hill. So, so much nostalgia, I'm just having a blast with this build! 😁

i just freshened up my brothers 939 rig put in 4gb ddr400 and i took a 2.2 dual core to 2.6 and took an xfx 9600gt 512mb from 625 core to 775 core and also brought up the shader clock and memory clock. needles to say it's still gaming just fine it also powers multi monitor setup only 1 screen is used for gaming though. I'm also digging the Shark case it looks sharp.

Damn 🤣, wish I had that rig 😁

Brings back some memories 😁

But I was on the cheaper socket, was it 754?

Asrock had these cute uATX boards for this socket. All based on Nvidia chipsets with onboard graphics. Rock solid I must add.

At the end I had a 4000+ and a 7900GTO. That was a mint system until Core 2 Duo came out and I upgraded to a E6600 machine.

Oh, memory lane....this thread has made me very nostalgic...so some pics from back in the day.... this is of my beloved, gone but not forgotten DFi NF3 Ultra-D. Specs as built were 2gb DDR400, Athlon 3000+ @2.4ghz and a 6600GT AGP. Eventually at some point I upgraded this to a Radeon 3850 AGP, then one day the board just died...some weird chip on it just burned 😢.

Lapped stock heatsinks...back when I had more time and less money! You couldn't pay me enough to do this now...

Just looking at the box was enough to make you jizz in your pants

Shinier than a very shiny thing

I still keep the box from my first ever s939 rig, an ECS Nforce 4. This was a real good board. Man it looked all about gaming. Too bad I don't have any pics from that build.

Think I choose this board because of the box.

Specs back then were, again a 3000+, 512mb ram (later upgraded to 2gb), Radeon X550 (and then an Nvidia 6600GT pcie). This build rocked back in the day and slaughtered all lowly P4s before it... then it rode the lightning (literally, there was a thunderstorm) and blew most of it's innards to Valhalla. RIP 😢

Oh yeah, you must be wondering how come I had a pcie build first and then went to AGP, instead of the other way round. Well after my ECS build died (incl the video card), I was back to using my HP Vectra P3. You can imagine my joy at that 😒.

And money was tight cause I just bought a new home, car and got married all in the same year. But I didn't want to be stuck with a P3 for too long, so I scrounged whatever parts that survived- the chip, hard disk, psu, case etc, but no video card. However, I had plenty of old AGP cards from my P3 systems. So I got an AGP s939 board and used an 'ol AGP card, till a couple months later I could get another 6600GT... 😁

Wooo, digging around I even found the pic of the ol 6600GT and 6200 AGP cards..

sgt76 wrote:

http://i724.photobucket.com/albums/ww245/sgt76/IMG_0001.jpg […]
Show full quote

That motherboard box has Mountain Dew cans and a BAWLS bottle on it.. I.. wow. They know their target audience.

Yeah the street racer / teenager advertising that hit computers early last decade was unfortunate.

My DF NF4 Ultra D was a decent board but I had problems with it. NF4's PCI bus has latency issues and this of course causes problems with sound cards. The NF4's Ethernet TCP offload will corrupt data if you install the firewall software. Also, DFI's BIOS had aggressive RAM timings by default and was unstable, causing me hours of grief when I first set up the system. And the maglev fan wore out and became horribly loud.

I had the NF4 Ultra D also, used it for maybe 5 months. I got mine used off ebay for maybe 70 bucks or something at the time. Seems like I remember the seller was taking a decent loss on the price I paid, since it was still fairly new. The board didn't give me any issues or anything. Originally I got it with the intention of modding the NF4 chipset for sli support, but opted out after I realized one 6800 was doing the job fine for me. In the end, I just sold the entire build for profit.

I used to have an A8N-SLI, had an Opteron 165 and a Radeon X1900GT on it. Great little board but the chipset fan was notorious for dying. I gave the board (and a 3700+) to a friend of mine, it still runs.

maddmaxstar wrote:

Great little board but the chipset fan was notorious for dying.

Tell me about it. The fan died on mine, and I only found out because the onboard LAN stopped working one day.

I replaced it with a Thermaltake Blue Orb (I think), and the board served me till I went to my Core 2 Duo. (With a PCI NIC of course...)

Here is a few pics of my socket 939 rig:

ASUS A8R32 MVP deluxe
Athlon 64 FX-55
2 gigs OCZ DDR 400
2 Radeon X1900 in crossfire
XP pro
The case its in now cools pretty well, but its a tight fit.

Cool rig, but really you should start your own thread to post yours, not hijack someone elses thread as it can be considered impolite to some.

ProfessorProfessorson wrote:

Cool rig, but really you should start your own thread to post yours, not hijack someone elses thread as it can be considered impolite to some.

Explain how this is hijacking. Several people have posted here.

IMO, you are the one being impolite.

I'm done here.

Honestly, I shouldn't have to explain this, but ok, here goes:
This thread was started about the original OP's socket 939 build. This thread was not titled, "hey everyone, official 939 thread, post your own systems and pics here too". Basically what people have been discussing has been on track with 939 discussion, but without going off topic so far as to make it totally about their own system only in their post.

Where as in your case, you didn't make any comment in regards to the Op's build, only your own, followed up by your specs. Basically what you posted was a starter thread post about your own system, in someone elses thread about theirs. That is considered hijacking. That may not be your intent, but that is simply what it is.

You could freely have started a new thread about your own system, like others have done, but simply chose not to. Not to say you were intending to do all of this to be rude, but it can be considered as much. If you check the system specs section, you will see all sorts of individual threads about peoples systems they just built. That is basically the proper/polite thing to do instead of taking over someone else's thread. Maintaining ignorance of it all after that fact doesn't make you appear any better in the situation, nor would trying to argue with me about it, so please, try to stay on topic, regarding the OP's build. Thanks.

What cooler are you using?

I just a look on the Arctic Cooling site and many of their current CPU coolers are compatible with socket 939 and 754!

I'm quite impressed...

The biggest cooler is this 300W Monster:

http://www.arctic.ac/en/p/cooling/cpu/422/fre … -co.html?c=2181

AFAIK any heatsink that's AM2/3 compatible will work with 939 and 754 too. The mounting design is essentially the same. Not sure about little-chatted-about 940.