Opteron X2 170 vs. Athlon 64x2 4800

Hi Dev Hardware Gurus,

I'm trying to upgrade my existing Opty 146 on a Gigabyte GA-K8N Pro-SLI motherboard to something with dual processors. I've got some legacy hard drives and Win XP Pro SP 3 that I'd prefer to keep on this motherboard.

According to the Gigabyte website this motherboard can use the Opteron 170 and/or the Athlon 4800+, 4600+, 4400+ and on.

I'm currently considering the Opteron 170 and Athlon 4800+. Both are roughly similar prices. I've never done any overclocking, though at the time I purchased this custom machine, the builder said the existing Operon 146 was very capable of it. However, I don't think the board's bios allows for convenient overclocking. I've had some struggles concerning stability of this board and chip combination, (though it has run better with SP3 than at any time since I've had it.

Thus, I probably won't be doing any overclocking.

Any thoughts on which processor I should go with?

Thanks for your help.

Bill B.
North Carolina

If it's for gaming I would go with the Opteron as it has twice as much cache, but I'm not sure how much of a difference the extra 1GHZ total clock speeds would make for the X2 to catch the opteron in performance. or if i'm wrong here, maybe someone more experienced will correct me

I would ALWAYS choose the opteron over a plain CPU as the cache will help a lot more than overall speed.

CPU design is so much more inefficient than GPU design, it'd be better to get more cache on CPU and letting the speed slide as a good enough GPU and that CPU will be more than enough for most things architectually speaking.

Hi weevilofdoom,

May I ask naively, What is GPU? How is more efficient than CPU design?

Also, the Ebay auction sites mention that the Opty 170 is equivalent to the Athlon 4200+. Does that mean that the Opty slower than the higher numbered Athlons (4600+, 4800+)?

Sorry for pestering you for more info.

Thanks for your help.

Bill B.

GPU= Graphics Processing Unit A.K.A your graphics card. as for being slower than the higher numbered athlon X2s, that's true when it comes to clock speed but clock speed matters very little anymore. maybe someone else will expand on why, i'm not great at explaining technology.

honestly, if you are not going to overclock, go with the 4800. i personally would go with the opty since I'd definitely immediately consider overclocking. plus, opterons are designed to run at higher temperatures (server environment) and thus are of better quality.

however, it is true that at stock it will be slower than the 4800. larger amounts of cache does not affect AMDs as much as it does intels, given amd's exclusive cache architecture.

To revive an oldish thread, but I have to point something out. The Skt 939 generation of X2 4800+ processors are equipped with the same amount of L2 cache as the Opteron. That said, the Opteron does clock higher, however this is indeed useless if you do not plan on overclocking.