Athlon 64

[Arminiusc]

Yes you definately have a valid point. 3dmark benchmarks the whole system with some preferences to the video card. The only time the cpu doesnt really matter in 3dmark is when the video card is maxed out and a faster cpu doesnt do any good. The latest video cards though are cpu limited. We already know that the athlon performs better with the higher fsb also.
Of course for DC projects sisofts drystones and whetstones would give a better indication of performance.
As always though... the best way to see if something does what you want is to try it yourself!
Is anyone going to buy one when its avaiable?

[Bionic_Redneck]

I don't plan on buying an opteron but will be needing another cpu as I still am planning on building a small diskless node cluster. Been thinking about getting one of the new duron 1800's if they are reasonable priced.

[Arminiusc]

I read somwhere that the durons are hackable to activate the full cache instead of the half-cache they come with, but some durons dont work well due to the fact that the other half of cache is faulty on some.

[Madcat]

It's funny you guys mention benchmarks and accuracy. The only one I know that isn't influenced by manufacturers (or so I read) is the spec.org benches like specviewperf. They do have a seperate cpu bench in thier lineup or the COSBI benches.

Sandra is a good general bench but tends to be more of a quick and dirty kind of test that doesn't put any one component through the wringer thoroughly, since it uses only a tiny bit of code that loops it over and over.

Found another one that may be of interest. I thought this one had died off. I guess they were just waiting for the AMD64 capable cpu's and compilers to come out. :D

[Bionic_Redneck]

I read somwhere that the durons are hackable to activate the full cache instead of the half-cache they come with, but some durons dont work well due to the fact that the other half of cache is faulty on some.

thats new to me but I have heard that the you can re-enable sse in duron morgans with wcpuid so it might also work for the applebred's too.