I was about to build a new system and I wanted to know if I had a budget of around 1300-1500 dollars if I could get as good as a 939 system as if I waited for AM2 or Conroe. I dont want to buy a 939 system and be out of date and slow in months.
Thanks

Its computers! Anything you buy will be out of date after a few weeks/couple of months. Wait Conroe oh but then AMD's 65nm will be around the corner so you'll have to wait for that and then the Conroe2 will be around the corner etc etc etc... its neverending

Consider basing your system on a Asrock 939Dual-SATA2 as it feature a special expension slot in which a riser with an AM2 Socket and 4 DDR2 dimm can be plugged into. That board also offer full AGP and PCI-Express support.

To my knowledge, no Conroe compatible motherboards are on the market yet as Conroes will require a different type of Voltage Regulation Modules.

Yeah, you most certainly can build now and with that budget, you'll be able to build a very sweet machine and it should remain in focus <lack of a better term> for at least a couple years or more. Just get an X2 series dual core or opteron 165 or 170, get a GOOD graphics card to keep you up to speed for the next year or two and you'll be set.

Here's ideally where you wanna be:

AMD X2 series or Opteron 165, 170
Good motherboard such as DFI UT NF4 series or ASUS, Epox, are all good. There are others too but, I primarily use DFI.
2 Gigs of DDR400 or higher speed memory, OCZ, Corsair, Crucial are good ones and their are others as well.
nVidia 7900 series or ATI X1900 series graphics
A quality power supply unit, I like and use 550 watt or better, OCZ, Antec, Enermax are a few good names
A good high airflow case, Cooler master, Lian Li are two names that make good cases

So that's generally the way you want to go and just to give you ideas.

I was also wondering if I had this build that in say 1 or 2 years if I got a top of the line video card if my computer would still run and function well especially on games. Because games do mostly rely on the video card right?

That's a nice 'rig but it is likely to cost more than 1300~1500$, toning down to a 7800/x1800 'ish GPU will fit the budget and still be competitive. I would also add a pair of fast, medium sized HDDs to build a RAID-0 array and a mid to high end heatsink.

Asrock 939Dual-SATA2
AMD Opteron 165
Corsair Twinx2048-3200c2 (50$ mail-in rebate)
Biostar Gf 7800GTX 256MB
2x Western Digital Caviar RE WD1600YD
Lian-Li PC-V600B
Enermax ELT500AWT
Tt Big Typhoon

Total : 1460$ before shipping and tax.

Consider that my Radeon 9700 is almost 3 years old, although long in the tooth, it still offer decent performances with the games I play (Mostly MMO's like Planetside and EvE-Online).

Hi Sandmannight.

If you want your computer now, I'd go for a socket 939 cpu. Think A64X2 4200+.

Now please, don't flame me for being an Intel fanboy, I got my computer for video editing (when cpu weren't the limiting factor for games ) before the A64 came out.

So, if like me there is no rush to upgrade ( I personally have a Northwood P4C 3.0Ghz cpu), I would wait for july and get a Conroe. First hand test show it destroying the present Pentium D and beating easily even the A64FX . As for the A64X2-DDR2, preview of it show few to no gain in performances in general (0-5% on general applications test). Go check this page on anandtech: http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipse [...] spx?i=2738

July being only 3 months away, it's worth waiting to upgrade for me. Would it have been 6 or more month away I would have got something like an Athlon64X2 4200+ which is a good performance/price ratio processor.

Good luck!

I will be buying it in june/july but I want to get a good computer for the price. If i can get a better performing 939 comp the I want to get that but if I can get the same or better with AM2 then I want to be current

In my opinion June/July will be too close to Conroe's release date to make a purchase decision... in light of that information I'd wait. That's just my 2 cents.

Well, like I said, you do like you want, but everything shows Conroe being a much better performance (both total and for price/performance point of view) than anything AMD has to offer in the short run.

Go check this other page at Anandtech where they compare current PentiumD XE 965 and A64FX60 to upcomming Conroe 2,66GHZ/1066fsb which won't be top of the line Extreme Edition: http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipse [...] =2725&p=10

I know it's only a part of the real story. We'll know for sure when it'll release in july. But the prospect is strong enough for you to keep your mind open about using Intel even if (no offence) you're an AMD fanboy. And if it turned out to be not so good, it won't cost you a dime more in july to use any AM2 socket A64.

Think about it!!

I have been playing with the ASRock board for a few weeks now and have discovered several things. 1. it loves dual core opty's I have a 165 overclocked to 2.3 (9x270). there are some bios issues above there. OCWorkbench has abeta bios to solve this. 2. it loves tight timings more than memory speed. I am running some MUshkin black Level II BH-5 in a 4x512 configuration 2 2-2-2-5-2t and 167mhz. . Everst 2006 scores are as follows:Cpu Queen 4277 Cpuphoto 1800+(I have the free version so I don't get an exact score here). CPUZlib-28586, CpuJulia-2705, Cpu Mandel-4000+ and Cpusinjulia-2489.all except mandel are faster than any cpumotherboard combo listed by everest includung 2 sets of Intel 925 and 975 chipsets and 2 Amd dualcores. Change timings and it all goes to hell. On Sandra Dhrystone is 21477 whetstone is 9828 integer is 45575 and floating point is 49194. Mushkin still sells the 990927 for $100 per pair. I am the hardware manager for the largest research facility non-government in the southwest. Dell has done a private showing of conroe and Hp the AM2. Due to latency issues I am not impressed with either one. Conroe barely compiles 64bit and AM2 is not an improvement over the current Opty's unless DDR2 improves a bunch on speed and latency. DDR2-667 is not going to cut it at any latency for either Conroe or AM2 and DDR2-800 is going to need to be 4-4-4--10 to compete. With the demise of UTT Winbond and Samsung TCCD there is no quality memory out there. Fortunately if you look you can still find OCZ Gold ELDCGE in a few stores and the Mushkin 990927 is UTT BH-5. I do have a ATI X850xt and my 3Dmark is 6671 compare that with what this site shows. My CPU is 6423. This is all at stock voltage and 0n air. the video card is not overclocked.