I heard Opteron's were meant for servers and aren't meant for gaming. Is this true? Will it still run games as well as a less powerful processor, such as a 3800+? I would appreciate different opinions because I plan on buying an Opteron 148 and Overclocking it for gaming... and I don't want to screw myself over.
the new 939 opertons are ideally neant for servers but now they can be put into desktops, they usually have the same cores as the Athlon64 brothers or more cashe in some cases. there are some excelent overclockers avail to buy but it depends on the stepping of the cpu itself as that depends how far it will OC. thse cpu's r fine for any use as they are simply the same cpu's as the A64's.
Thanks Thanks, I was just very concerned. My dad works with servers and he said it may come back to bite me in the ass.
There are various other tweaks in the silicon as well; the early ones were made with a strained silicon on insulator process, which allowed them to overclock like crazy The newer ones just use "regular" SOI, which limits their overclocking capabilities thanks to the larger die size of the 1 meg L2 cache cores.
Yeah, what's been said is basically right on. The Opteron is essentially a rebadged Athlon FX-50-series. Same core as the Athlon 64's, but more cache. I have an Opteron 148, stock speed of 2.2GHz, and it overclocked to 2.8 with no voltage boost. I got it up to a hair over 2.9GHz by adding some more juice. For reference, mine's a CABYE stepping. It wasn't the best ones released, but it was pretty good. I'm not sure what the current ones are or how well they OC, though.
Check my sig for mine. Meant to be one of the worse steppings, but, well, i'll let my clock speed do the talking.
