146 Opteron to 3800X2 worth the $$$?

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2k2_zx2

[H]ard|Gawd
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Jul 13, 2003
Messages
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I currently have a 146 Opteron, running stock speeds, 2.0, never tried to overclock it.

With the new AMD price cuts coming up, would it be any sort of upgrade replacing my 146 with a 3800X2? We got our current system almost a year ago and really dont want to replace eveything and go with the AM2 stuff. Never really paid much attention to the dual-core stuff until I saw what the prices are going to be around. Do both cores work together when gaming or are they always separate?

We mainly play games (Oblivion, Half-Life 2, Far Cry) and do some dvd burning and photoshop.

Current system is:

146 Opteron at 2.0 (XP-90 cooler)
eVGA SLI board
7800GT
1.5GB DDR400 (2x512, 2x256)
500W Ultra-X
 
the dual core will help later on and it will help with the photoshopping and the dvd a bit.
If you aren't gonna upgrade your pc for a while then sure the x2 is worth it.
if in 6 months you are gonna upgrade again I wouldn't get one just yet.

I would overclock your opteron to like 2.4 and then ditch the 4 sticks of ram to bring you to 1 gig with two sticks or buy a 2 gig kit.

really for what you do a 2 gig kit of ram and a modest overclock would net you what you want for less money. thats probably the way I would go
 
Well, we try to go at least one year before we do anything upgrade wise.

We had 2 sticks of 256MB DDR400 and we just recently got 2 sticks of 512MB DDR400 ram for a total of 1.5GB. If I have to buy different ram, I dont think I will be buying more ram until we are ready to go with DDR2 with the next gen setups. I'd rather keep what I have and get the "better" of the 2 processors.

I just want to know if going with the 3800X2 is a better choice than overclocking my 146.
 
Unless you want to game AND do dvd burning/pshop at the same time, you will see bigger gains simply OCing your 146. You should easily get 2.6Ghz+ on stock voltage (10 x 260HTT for example).

Of the games you mentioned, only Oblivion is multi-threaded...and its effects aren't as large as say a game like Q4. So again, just enhance what you already have. No point in going X2 just yet.
 
So between the X2 and 146, which one will perform "better" at their stock speeds?
 
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