Socket 939 vs. 754

OK. I've been looking for the last few weeks at AMD 64-bit motherboard/processor combos and have been told to go for socket 754 because its better. I decided, hey might aswell go for future technology rather than something that will be outdated soon.
But it seems that socket 939 processors are slower than their 754 brothers, and they cost a hell of alot more, not to to mention other problems I have heard of regarding power supplies and BIOS options.
The main problem is price. As soon as I opt for 939 stuff, the rpice is bumped an extra £40 at least.
Why should I go 939? And If I do, can you find me a mobo/pro combo that costs less than £170?

Whoever is giving you that information if wrong. Socket 939 is faster than Socket 754. Socket 939 supports Dual Channel memory where as Socket 754 does not. Socket 939 is the future of AMD as it stands right now. I see no reason to go to Socket 754 unless you're under a really tight budget.

Socket 939 has a few more kinks than Socket 754 because it is newer, but most of the problems seemed to be solved (most of the problems I've heard about are because of the new 90nm processors).

With your budget, Socket 754 seems to be the only option since it's tough to find a Socket 939 processor slower than 3500+.

TomK is right in every issue. I'm currently using Asrock K8 Combo. U can check this out, and costs about $70. It doesn't allow to use both processors together though, but later on u can switch to 939 socket.

get a 3000+ winchester core and a abit AV8 you can get this for about £160

If you can afford it go for a 3200+ as it has a higher multiplier and you will get a higher cpu speed without maxing your board out 10x multi vs 9x on the 3000+ the 3000+ will still overclock very well average of about 2.2 - 2.3ghz on stock cooling.

I very recently ordered a 3200+ 939 over any 754 socket CPU, AMD and Intel wouldnt make a new socket which performed worse than their old one

Funny how people these days still wanna look at the mhz or ghz for determining performance when it really donesn't mean anything with the latest cpu's these days.

Intel use a higher multiplier than AMD just to sell more beacuse their processors look more impressive in Ghz, which is a very nice little scam.

Heres to AMD

GhZ does matter. Obviously it's tough to compare two different architectures but GhZ is still a valuable tool for determining speed.

well, ghz is valuble but the float point is far better (flops)....

Real tough for eg 2.3ghz athlon xp, 2.3ghz P4, 2.3ghz A64 S747, 2.3ghz A64 S949, none of them can be really compaired at all by using ghz or mhz the s747 and 939 might be close but that's only because of being a similar chip, The only thing i think it could be still used for is orginal pentiums and upto P3, Still valuable if you want a really rough guess.

GHz can be a very misleading measurement; firstly it applies to a number of different things (the bus clock rate vs. bus rate x clock multiplier), and it doesn't (directly) take into account the effect of memory bandwidth, north bridge/south bridge disparities, the speed of other chipsets, burst speeds and burst-like technologies (that are constantly being added), parallellized execution (like Intel's hyperthreading, or wide, vectorized instructions), or cache size/access scheme.

If everything else is equal, and the only difference is the Ghz rating on the processor's maximum bus capability, then it is a useful measurement of comparative performance, if you divide the speed differences by about 4 (i.e. 600 Mhz vs 800 Mhz bus yields about a 7% performance improvement).

The speed of a computer as a whole can generally be measured by the weakest of processor frequency, clock multiplier, memory frequency, motherboard features. and cache rate. If you weaken any one of these, you'll suffer a noticeable performance hit under most applications.

As far as I can tell (and I may have forgotten something important above, this is sort of an 'at least' post), you're best bang for your buck is to balance the various processor factors.

See everyone has a reason for why or what id better

These companies Intel and AMD has begun a little war of their own for the world money market.

We the user are the ones benefitting from it. Problem is deciding what to get.

So as said above it will have to fit your budget. You cant loose really.

REMEMBER what you buy now is very old 6months down the line. Not one of these companies will be outshined by the other so they continually pushing new technologies.

I bought my AMD 64 3000+ S754 about 6mnths ago or so and i only heard that the socket 939 chip will be available the next month or so in my country for purchuse. Obviously very expensive.

I couldve waited and then buy it, use it for 6mnths and then just to find out that something else is coming out soon

Around and around we go....

So finally your budget will decide what to get... until you can upgrade again after about 2yrs max.