Do you know the differences between the Opteron, Athlon 64, Athlon 64 X2 and Athlon 64 FX? They can be hard to figure out. Some of the main differences are:
Single or Dual Core
L2 Cache
Number of HyperTransport links
Supported RAM
Price
The AMD64 Core is what all of these processors are based on, so a lot of the features are shared. The Opterons, however, were made for servers and they’re a bit beefier. You can also use them in a desktop machine and do some insane overclocking. The FX is catered towards gamers and the X2 is supposed to be for the more serious computer user. Personally, I’m going to go with an Opteron.
I have a couple links here you can check out. I really liked the first one, and the second one was ok. I’ll put some of the highlights below.
http://www.devx.com/amd/Article/27340
http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=1466&page=6
“The Athlon 64 has one HyperTransport link, which is dedicated to I/O access. All devices send (and receive) data to and from the processor on this link. As we shall see shortly, Opteron processors by contrast support multiple links.”
“All Opteron models come with three HyperTransport links (vs. a single link for Athlon 64).”
I just upgraded from a socket 754 athlon 2800 (1.8GHz) to a Pentium D 805 dual 2.66GHz. While the 805 scores about somewhere between 30% to 50% faster on PCMark05, the gaming performance on 3dmark05 is almost identical. (meaning the performance is being determined by the video card)
If you’re going with a motherboard with an AGP bus, Hypertransport in any flavor has plenty of bandwidth to spare.
Even that old single HT cpu on a motherboard with single channel RAM was able to keep up with the video card.
This will change as multithreaded games become more common.