Upgrading a 2005 Gaming PC for Early 2006
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- čas přidán 21. 07. 2024
- A special thanks to tamw for donating the hardware showcased in this video. This time around we upgrade and bench the 2005 Gaming PC with a dual-core CPU, high quality RAM, and a fast DirectX 9 GPU. Is it now ready for the demands of some games of 2006 and beyond? Let's find out.
If you haven't watched it yet, I suggest you check out the first video here: • Building and Benching ...
Links
/ discord
Timestamps
0:00 - Intro
0:33 - CPU Upgrade
1:20 - RAM Upgrade
1:47 - Graphics Card Upgrade
2:25 - Misc Upgrades & what hasn't changed
2:56 - Overclocking
4:20 - Games & Testing Methodology
5:13 - Benchmarks
13:54 - Cinebench 2003 Results
14:26 - Conclusion - Věda a technologie
My pleasure! Way too little content on socket 939 out there for it's awesomeness, but you knocked it out of the park as usual!
I really appreciate the parts man, this ended up being a very fun one to make! Glad you enjoyed 😀
I have a lot of nostalgia for socket 939. I made my Socket 939 computer last 10 years. Granted it couldn't play a lot of games towards the end but it was a reliable machine.
@@YTKeepsDeletingAllMyComments Same , it was my first socket build ever , still have 2 A8N32-SLI Deluxe brand new in box 😅 . Might do a build soon .
He has pleasured you with his personal cocputer and dual cork pcp.
The good old days of 720p, screen tearing and lack of AA. I member.
768p for life
720p (16:9) was actually never really used on PC, you had probably 1280x1024 in 2006 and then probably 1680x1050 or even 1920x1080 already in like 2008 or 9. Some cheap displays had 1366x768, but I really don't remember any 720p displays. Ofcourse some poeple still had CRTs and were playing in 1024x768, that was still common in 2006.
got into the member berries i see 😂
Oh! You had Voodoo² SLI too? Cool...wait 😛
Absolutely underrated channel, love the content mate 👌🏻
Thanks! I really appreciate it, glad you enjoy the videos! 👍
That CPU is a good one! 3GHz on S939 isn't common.
Good to know, I thought it would have been par for the course 😅 I wonder if I could push it any further with a better cooler, could also pair it with a 2900 XT or 8800 to let it stretch its legs a bit
@@SPNG
I could only dream of the 8800gtx and hd2900/3870 back then, those will definitely match it better even tho my soft spot will always be the x1900xtx haha. As for further overclocking it could be worth a shot, but the sweetspot was usually 3ghz for the better steppings, best you could hope for is 3.1ghz with 1.55v with that one, but even that may be a stretch. Also you may need a DFI board to push further as the power delivery on the mainstream boards wasn't the best and you'll need very stable voltage for those high "on the edge" speeds.
Never got past 2.8GHz stable myself :/
@@SPNGIt definitely is an extremely good CPU speed. My x4200 only ran at 2.2 GHz, and had HALF the Cache per core. But as for memory: Nope, the 500 MHz Geil is NOT the best. I did see 600 MHz Geil Platinum DDR1 sticks for sale back then (they were more like 550 MHz CL2 sticks, but yeah...)
@@SPNG so fun fact back then I tried something similar, I upgraded from an x1900GT to an 8800GTS 320, i got very little preformance uplift, at the time I was using an X2 5200 BE overclocked to 3.1ghz, i then bought an X2 7750 BE and got a significant boost, the old A64 arch was just getting old, in truth A64 is just K7 from 1999 with an onboard memory controller, Hammer is barton with 64bit instructions and an IMC bolted on.
I am still "hunting" for an Opteron of that age and a DFI motherboard. Great video !
Thanks! And best of luck, DFI has become like the 3dfx of motherboards on the used market these days 😅
If you can find an ASUS A8N SLI Platinum board, then that is also a good choice. The s939 had 2 main chipsets. The N meant NVIDIA, with SLI support. Unfortunately most manufacturers did not install adequate cooling on those chipsets (including ASUS), so they killed themselves. One exception was the Asus A8N-SLI Premium motherboard, as it used a heat pipe cooler for the chipset.
For some perspective on how nuts the pace of development was at this time, by the end of 2006, Intel would introduce their first Core 2 Quad, the Core 2 Extreme QX6700, and nVidia would release the 8800 GTX, a GPU that could often match or even beat X1900s in crossfire or 7900s in SLI.
It was crazy how quickly stuff was advancing at this time, there's only about a 1.5 year gap between the 7800 GTX to X1900 XTX to 8800 GTX but the difference in performance between them is insane. You don't see stuff evolving that quickly now, but then again people tend to keep their hardware for a lot longer before upgrading these days
@@SPNGI think the CPU market was the bigger shock.
Think about it this way:
In 2000 We had 1 GHz Coppermine CPUs with 256 kB L2 Cache. We received the Tualatin CPUs with 512 kB L2 Cache and 1400 MHz. But those could be tuned to run at 2 GHz.
Basically, in parallel we had the Pentium 4 CPUs running from 2000 to 2004 in 2 sockets: 423 for SD RAM and 478 for the DDR1.
But then AMD came out with the 64 bit Athlon64 line in late 2003, just as Intel started to ship the new Extreme Edition CPUs.
By 2005 we had Dual Core PentiumD and Athlon X2 CPUs. And by 2006 we had the first Quad Core CPUs
So yeah, CPU power went a lot faster than GPU power in my opinion.
In terms of Graphics card performance:
AGP 1.0 came out in 1997, and supported 2x speed.
AGP 2.0 came out in 1998 and supported 4x speed.
AGP 3.0 came out in 2002 and supported 8x speed. But AGP 3.0 was never in production, as nobody ever made a card for a 0.8V voltage. All we ever got was the 1.5V universal cards.
We had to wait till 2003 to the the PCI-e slot for better performance. And if you think about it: It had double the speed of the latest AGP slots: 4 GB/s instead of 2.
PCIe 2.0 was not introduced until 2007, and that is about the start of the Core i-series era...
Man, I can't wait for 2006! It's gonna be awesum!
this is a cool series, retroactively upgrading a system year by year. Its cool to see what parts change super quick or stick around for 'years'
I was fortunate enough to have stumbled on this video. This era of parts is just right before I started getting into PC gaming. I'll be looking out for more of your videos. Awesome stuff!
Much appreciated, I'm really glad you enjoyed 😀
Finally someone benched “battlefield 2” most tech channels skip that game! That game made everyone have to upgrade there computer!
It was a game I wasn't benching for the longest time, glad to have it in my test suite now. And I bet, it definitely put this system through its paces!
Great video as always! Those are definitely some nice games with the updated RAM/CPU/GPU. The CPU overclock is also nice when you are not GPU bottlenecked. Also, I was glad to see some Battlefield 2 action this time!
Much appreciated man, I'm glad you enjoyed! I wasn't completely satisfied with the suite in the last video so I put a lot more into it this time. And yep, Battlefield 2 is finally here! Was probably one of the biggest misses in my game repertoire up until now. I need to work on my testing methodology with it as I had some trouble getting consistent runs but it was still nice to test it out!
Flashback intensified ❤
Just found your channel on my algorithm. Subscribed
Glad I made you think of this old hardware again 👍 And much appreciated, welcome to the channel!
What a great content! I'm glad that i found your channel! Keep it running bud
Much appreciated 👍 Enjoy the videos!
I never had the OCZ platinum just the gold. It was so different back then in terms of brands. Antec was the best PSU maker and I had Abit motherboards nvidia made motherboard chipsets and ATI was not owned by AMD. You definitely had a point regarding the advancements back then. I would upgrade much more frequently because it was needed but also parts were cheaper. Budget was like 60 bucks and mid range 200 bucks. Now 200 is budget and mid range is 600. And you can keep parts for half a decade and they will barely have aged.
OCZ was a brand that I really liked. Had a modular OCZ power supply that looked similar to the heatsinks (all shiny) and that PSU lasted me a long time.
Awesome video as always and a huge shout-out to the viewer that made this video possible 👏
Im excited for the next build, maybe something close to 2008? 🤞
Thanks man, glad you enjoyed the video. And definitely, he's a legend for sending the parts! And you're very close 😉 It'll be a bit of an unconventional build but it should be a fast (and unlike this system, easy to replicate) late-2000s beast!
Nice to see 939/NF4 content. FWIW the x1900 was an x1800 with a slightly higher clock speed, but with 3 times the shaders of the x1800. So they don't have a ton of headroom, even the x1800 ran pretty hot back then, hence the squirrel cage coolers (loud). You may be able to get the FSB up to 266, just depends on the cpu, but the Opteron's were basically binned Athlon 64's. I have a 165 on an Abit AN8-SLI that runs happily at 2.7Ghz by way of bumping the bus to 333, lowering my PC400 ram to to 266 and changing the link speed to 3.5. It was a beast back in the day, while I don't have my x1800xt anymore, I do have a HD3870 installed on it now and it runs fantastic for XP era games.
I had socket 754 back in the day, i was so envious of 939
Awesome build and video series, I went back and watched the previous just to get the context of this upgrade. For XP I don't really go higher than an A64x2, and right now I'm well under it.
A build which currently sits on a shelf collecting dust is an A8N32-SLI deluxe, FX60, and dual 1gb 8800GTs. I know it's a bit anachronistic with the later G92 die-shrunk cores, but they run quiet, cool, and max out the CPU at the speeds I run it (usually 438/2800, because I like the board too much). 3ghz is really good for ANY 939 64x2.
Much appreciated man, glad you enjoyed. This was a fun little series to do! And that's an awesome build, I heard 8800GT's can be really good in SLI. I should try it out myself at some point
now this is some proper tech content. i absolutely love old pc's, and now with 2000's pc parts being so cheap i can easily build a dream spec pc from those years
Much appreciated! I love testing old systems too, a lot of the parts are going up in price these days because a lot of people consider them collectable, but you can still find a lot of retro PC parts for cheap if you know where to look 👍
still got my old dfi lanparty ultra d, 7800gt and a 4000+ that i had running @3150mhz. many hours were spent playing BF2 on that :D
i did try other cpus in it, 146, 3800x2 4200x2 all topped out around 2800 and werent as quick in games as the 4000+ was. you were extremely lucky to get 3ghz out of your dual core.
Loved this thank you
Thanks, glad you enjoyed 😀
Apropos of nothing, I just had the most amazing thought. Someone out there needs to start a channel whose thing is to larp like it is the early 2000's and just run a regular tech channel talking about mags and hardware of that era as though it just came out. Do upgrades, have review embargoses, benchmarks. It's great because all the hardware and games and software and magazines are already released. Time delayed content genius.
I really miss this time in PC hardware, it was actually exciting to see new hardware. Now we just get minor uplifts in performance and nothing really new.
For sure! You're not gonna see this kind of performance increase in a lot of modern hardware, and if you do it's gonna be crazy expensive 😵
Still have my x2 2.5ghz. 4gb ddr400 & 9800gtx+ tower in storage. Was a solid system for years before I got out of the game back in 2012.
Man I don't remember Battlefield 2 looking so rough. Nostalgia is a hell of a thing.
I recently modernised an Athlon 64 x2 for a friend of mine, 8GB RAM, 1TB SSD, An old Nvidia GTX460 and Windows 10. Does most things just fine including playing youtube at 720P.
Id say it aged pretty well.
I remember, that he 939 platform went up to x4200 / x4400 Dual Core CPUs. Which is bonkers, if you think about the fact, that those were essentially AM2 CPUs made to work in the 939 socket. Had one myself, and they were surprisingly long lived. I think I upgraded from my x4200 system to a Thinkpad T61 with an NVS graphics card in 2010...
Oh the times when I had absolutely no idea how pc works and I was just having fun with 20 fps in a very low res. Now I feel every stutter and see drops below 120 fps in 4k
That is super nice! I have a mix match rig of around that era. Athlon x2 4400+ OC'd to 2.4GHz, Asus A8N32-SLI, sporting a slightly newer 9800 GTX+
Thanks, 939 systems are very fun! I want to get a multi-GPU capable board like that at some point 😀
@SPNG oh yea, was super lucky, friend was getting rid of his old gaming rig, so i snatched it up
Guy great channel, the asus crosshair was an awesome mother board released in 2006 any chance of seeing an sli setup running x2 8800gtx cards ? Maybe with the amd athlon 6400 😊
Upgrading is the PC's superpower.
*I still have my socket 939 mATX build with Operon 146. Was fun back in the day as I never heard of anyone else using a server CPU in a mATX system!* 😁
Definitely a unique config, there must have been hardly anyone running a system like that back in the day! What graphics card did you pair with it?
Core 2 quad is the GOAT
X1900 XTX was my dream GPU back in 2006 so it awesome to see it being tested in era-correct hardware with modern methodology. really interesting how much the 7800 GTX gets clobbered compared to reviews back in the day, even in its old OGL stomping grounds with Doom. (maybe i'm thinking about the 512MB version)
Love testing the X1900 XTX! It's amazing how much longevity the card has thanks to its architecture and pixel shading power, in older games it's not too much faster than the 7800 GTX but in anything beyond 2006/2007 the X1900 blows the 7800 GTX away completely.
Lucky you,me, having collected the same hardware (even the Zalman VGA cooler), can't find some spare time for the build.
But,i did managed to revive a DFI LANPARTY X58 motherboard.
Btw,WiC,the darn thing,on the highest settings still can put a modern hardware under a heavy load.
Nice, those DFI boards are very hard to come by and worth bringing back. And I agree, World in Conflict is still a fairly demanding game considering when it was made!
Minor nitpick but I noticed the DDR slots 1&2 are populated wrong. You’re running it in single channel mode. Put the second stick into the third slot to run your RAM in dual channel mode. It will increase the memory bandwidth and you get fps gains on memory heavy games like Crisis. It might also explain why you’re not seeing much of an uplift in some games.
Anyways, cheers!
Weirdly enough every time I used the same color slots, hardware information apps like CPU-Z or HWInfo would report it running in single channel, but when I mix slot colors like in the video they say it's running in dual channel. Not sure if they're wrong or something but that's just what I noticed. Thanks for watching 👍
Late, but I love the gran Turismo music.
Wow that EVGA 7800GTX KO edition … awesome
I love that card, having it in the system was great but it we were gonna need a little more kick for this tests!
Damn, this video makes me feel OLD. Talking about 2006 like is was ancient history. Well 18 years ago, I guess it is. FFF
I played FEAR on 2x 7950gx2 in quad SLI on an x58 board … it was awesome
Must have ran well, FEAR tends to scale nicely with multi GPU setups 😀
MAN that x1900 looks SWEET
It's a favorite of mine, I like the way that card looks (and performs!) 😀
What's the song used at the start of the conclusion chapter? I have definitely heard it before but i can't place it anywhere... I thought it was part of the R:Racing Evolution soundtrack but apparently I'm mistaken.
It's part of Gran Turismo 6's lounge music, FilFla - Cone Pone Tone
To bad many of these older motherboards with electrolytic caps are dead or on their way out these days. I went through several and gave up. Went with a later lga775 Asus board that has all solid state caps. Core2Duo and a GTX280. Went for a top level 2008 PC. Plays all my old games very well with XP 32bit.
Thankfully it seems like this board is a survivor, I don't notice any bulging/leaking caps. And that sounds like an awesome build, would have been pretty incredible in 2008 for sure!
A8N-SLI* and an Opteron 180 Perfect! 'cause what I've saved from back then - to now in 2024+
*CLEAN! - not all the other versions
PS and MOM used it untill the end of Win7 in 2020.
Here before a million views.
It's wishful thinking for sure but who knows haha 😅
I need to try to find an original Slot A 1ghz athlon motherboard. I miss the old Nintendo Cartridge. The form factor that birthed "Athlon" the Ryzen of 2000
Bloodjy hell I'm still using that exact case!
Can't blame you, it's a really good case! I loved using it for this build
Thanks for Devil May Cry 4, try to find S3 Chrome 540 GTX from 2008-2009 )))
S3 Chrome 540 GTX most dont know "what is that" !
It would be interesting to see if it performs as good as the Xbox 360 on later games like Far Cry 3, MW3, Arkham City, Mafia 2, Borderlands, Assassins Creed 2. It would probably need an OS upgrade.
I had one of those motherboards and i had no problem running a 4400+ on it. But there was some issues with some nvidia-cards on it, but a bios update fixed that.
It was very stable for all of the testing! And I noticed that too, my 7900 GTX never worked in this board. What's weird is even the latest BIOS didn't get it to work, while my 7800 GTX always worked totally fine in this system. All of my ATI cards work as well, ironic considering it has an NVIDIA chipset 😆
Yes, it was almost as nvidia was not compatible with themself sometimes.@@SPNG
had athlon 64 with x300 radeon and 1 gb ram used it from 2004 to 2012 :D played crysis multi on that thing with 20 30 fps :D
Wow you got a lot of longevity out of a system like that, amazing considering how fast hardware was evolving back then! And that poor X300, it must have been on its knees trying to run Crysis 😆
How did you delid it? Also whats the name of the cooler you have?
It came like that when the viewer sent it. Not sure how he did it, but there should be a few old guides online if you want to find out how. The cooler was just a Phenom II stock cooler by AMD
pretty sure ive got a tall ATX case that has water cooling built into the case for the 939. pretty sure all the parts are there for it too
Fire it up at some point, that would be an awesome system! Just check to make sure that all is well with the water loop beforehand 👍
@SPNG doesn't have any board or anything in the case currently but yep that's the plan is putting some sort of vintage retro style machine back in it. I've got an asus 939 board set aside for it
A Sonata would be a nice case for a sleeper build. Sucks that I sold my one years ago.
That stinks 😢And I agree, its pretty unassuming from the outside but has very good expandability!
With a card in the 1x slot, you could upgrade from SATA 1 - 150MB/s to a slightly downgraded SATA 2 (250MB/s) or a downgraded SATA 3 for a card in the x4/x2 slot - the "x4" cards tend to use an x2 chipset anyway
I didn't think of that! The SSD was pretty quick to use anyway but that would make it even better
I preferred when CPU's had pins. Much easier to repair a bent ZIF (zero insertion force) pin than a LGA (large grid array) socket pin.
I've had my ups and downs with both, I'm fine with either at this point 🤷♂
@@SPNG I had to use my phone's zoom to get a clear picture of my old LGA1151 pins back in 2016 and still couldn't get it back in place. There are no tests on the performance difference between LGA and ZiF but I'd say there are none. I'd hazard a guess that it was to save money for CPU manufacturers.
I know, right? I *LOVE* it when the CPU gets ripped right out with the cooler, despite giving it a minute of wiggling back and forth.
It saves so much time over having to then remove it from the retention mechanism. Bonus: it keeps AMD in business.
My father killed our 4200 X2 that way and I killed my 1700 that way.
I'm not entirely sure how one manages to damage LGA pins outside of dropping something.
LGA is much more expensive to produce vs ZIF. That's why AMD held onto it for too long.
@@tim3172 LGA puts the burden on the motherboard manufacturers to produce the, what would previously have been, pins. Thus motherboards shoot up in price and CPU manufacturers still charge a premium. They both win. It could cost the motherboard manufacturers only a few $ to implement an LGA socket and they charge $50-100 extra for it. I can repair bent pins in just a few mins but a few bent LGA contact points could take hours. Then there is the problem with things like PCI-e and even the original PCI. It's all to push sales in my opinion. If the graphics card makers all kept to PCI (original) and all CPU makers kept to .... Say ... Socket 1. With a replaceable chipset the motherboard manufacturers would lose out big time. And, why can't NVMe's run on IDE cables? There is no reason that the same electrical signal can't run down the copper wires of an IDE cable.
i had this exact case...
the highest i got from my opty was 3.2 any higher required stupid amounts of voltage
I guess this is more or less the practical limit for my chip then. I haven't tried anything above 3GHz yet, mainly because even the Phenom II stock cooler was pretty lacking for this chip. Maybe I'll pick up a Wraith Max and start tuning it again
You're this old if you remember the copper OCZ
I’d of gone with the DFI lanparty bord how I miss them with there uv slots rip dfi
I heard some of the DFI boards can be good for overclocking, if only they weren't so rare and expensive
12:58 everybody always wants to talk about average FPS, but look at the low end .1% lows on the OC. WAY more stable IMO
The stutter definitely improved on the overclocked setup there! Even if the averages didn't scale too well there tended to be some kind of improvement with the lows.
x1900xtx was known as a bad overclocker back in the day, its what made the 1950xtx so viable because most people couldn't actually get their x1900xt to those speeds, and the Athlon 64 x2 939 chips are limited to between 2.8-3.1 on air depending on bin, your doign fine
Quite a few people seem to be saying this, I'm kind of surprised there isn't much more room to tune! I figured I was wasn't even close to pushing this stuff to its limits.
@@SPNG not that stuff, even the 65nm shrink for AM2 got them to at most 6.4 on air for the a64 line, and the R480 was just always running at its limit.
in 2006 if you wanted to overclock it was
Pentium D/Core 2 and Geforce 7900GS/7900GT
The awesome fun was with something like a Pentium D 805 and a 7900GS, that was the overclocking build for its day
I have an AMD64 PC that can play some low resource modern games.
Far cry 2 ran on the 360 pretty good!
Technology changed so much. In these days
For sure, from one year to the next you could expect huge performance advancements on both the CPU and GPU side during this time!
The X1900 XTX basically can’t overclock, the GPU is pretty much already maxed out and the fastest really anyone could go was 690-700mhz
Also, where do you get your games from? Especially half life 2 and other steam only games
Ah I see, would make sense why its so hard to tune. Still, I feel like maybe I'm not doing something quite right with the voltages and stuff, wouldn't be opposed to do trying some more tuning again at some point. I get some of my games from GOG, and for Half Life 2 I wanted an early version of the game for testing so I found the collector's edition somewhere online. It works a treat and plays a lot nicer with this hardware than the newer versions.
I had a set of that ram once, it was expensive as, but damn it was fast. Was stolen from me. To this day im super pissed.
RIP 😢 It's a great kit for sure
2:39 for the RAM:
"Always insert the memory modules into the GREEN slots first, and
it is strongly recommended not to insert the memory modules into
the PURPLE slots while the GREEN slots are left empty."
-K8N Neo4F manual, section 2, page 8.
You don't appear to be operating in dual-channel mode because you're using a combination of green and purple slots.
You posted in the other video that you were in dual-channel. I'm just saying that the manual disagrees with you on that.
Odd. When I use one green slot and one purple slot, all the hardware information apps I use (CPU-Z and HWInfo) tell me it's running in dual channel (you can actually see this at 3:19), when I used the green slots for both sticks (how I ran the system when first putting it together) they reported it running in single channel. I don't know if the manual is wrong or something, but that's just what I noticed.
That gpu looks like as if it came from another planet.
The Duorb cooler is so weird, definitely one of the strangest looking coolers I've put on a card! It works a treat though, the card runs very cool with it compared to the stock one.
5:25 69 frames, NICE.
You need a better CPU cooler. If I still had it I would throw you my old Zalman cooler I had on my 939 build.
Yeah, the Phenom II stock cooler is lacking on this chip for sure, it got pretty hot during the overclocked testing. It's hard to find a lot of the period-correct coolers on the used market, I might just grab a Wraith Max or something.
I'm not your mother asshole make your own coffee 😂😂😂. Great video! Would love to see how much further you can upgrade this PC. Not sure if there were 939 quadcore opterons or not but dropping in GTX 280 or something can see this cpu at it's max
I laughed out loud the first time I saw that benchmark 😆 Dual cores were the limit for this platform but I think this CPU could see its limits with something like a 2900 XT or 8800 GTS/GTX, the X1900 is fast but it doesn't let this chip stretch its legs.
Your coffee sucks Hans!
Oblivion the crysis of 2006 imo
It was a bit of a system killer for sure, especially on the graphics side of things! Even the overclocked setup didn't get a 60 fps average in it
i think you misclicked and scheduled this video for 18 years in the future mate
Big oopsie from SPNG
hey I have a bunch of old parts if you are looking to buy. I also got a old ati laptop and a pentium desktop with a r5 430 in it but it is a vista/win 7 era pentium. Pc and laptop would be like 40$ and you pay for shipping. And the parts for like 35$ and fedex shipping. HMU if you are interesteed. I also have a old 3d card but Idk what it is called it is with the pc parts.
I'll pass for now but I appreciate the offer!
Windsor is pronounced with an er sound as if it was spelled Windser
I knew someone was going to point this out xD I looked up the pronunciation after doing my voiceover and was like, damn! Someone's gonna tell me 🤣
I like computers but this is nut nut land. The hardware needed to run those games could in 2024 is so low that a second hand laptop that is out of date by today's standards would play them for next to nothing in price, so why do all this ? I don't get it it.
Yeah, you could just use an old laptop for this, but where's the fun in that? 😉I like being able to customize the system and overclock parts like the CPU and RAM, and there's a lot more expandability potential in a system like this. Also, testing old hardware is fun 😀
Same reason people buy old cars. It's fun. Plus it's cool to see how hardware of the era handles games of the era. Doing that on a cheap laptop isn't anything near the same.
Am2+ Socket was legendary soooooooo many options semprons opterons athlons phenom phenom2.1,2,3,4,5,6 core options and with the phenom2's if you had an am2+ motherboard it allowed you to upgrade to am3+ platform carrying the cpu forward with its ddr2 and ddr3 memory capabilitys. dunno i view that era of amd as a Golden Era of sense and logic. unlike intel spitting out 32 different sockets in that era.
i wish i had a use for this old Hp Wx9300 Work station with dual opteron 270's its always been in limp mode running on 1 opteron 270 . its never part of the budget it needs at least 2 more gb of ddr1 ecc 1gb x 2 sticks and a heat sink for the second cpu.. and it would be its x2core x2socket quad..i see the mother board cropping up on ebay for like 500$+
when it was in operation it would Take the whole +50mhz on its fsb that the bios would allow never seen a cpu take a full fsb over clock. i'll give it that. it was playing world of tanks on standard renderer with a hd6850 and getting around 30 40 fps with the full 250mhz fsb over clock.
Opterons are So jive.. all my experience with opterons have led me to believe that they are the middle child of Sempron and Athlon... with 0 extra features... its just better then sempron but not as good as athlon. and then Bulldozer happened.... and opteron became something semi special as they crammed 16 cores on a die where FX could only hope for 8...all complete with 1/2 the floating points.