Arkaign
Lifer
- Oct 27, 2006
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My Socket 939 X2 4200+ is still working great after six years. The only thing that has gone wrong with the entire setup (A8N-SLI Premium with PCI-E 1.0, 1GB DDR 400, 6800GT) is the motherboard's BIOS battery died. I need to get around to replacing it.
Processors rarely go bad. I personally know some people still running Pentium and Pentium II computers. I'm sure there's people out there still running a 486 for kicks too.
With that said, a single core, power-hungry Netburst CPU has definitely seen its better days. Upgrading to a moderate modern system (i3 / i5 or Athlon II X2 / X3 / X4) with a decent motherboard, 2+ GB of memory, and a solid state disk will make you completely reconsider your love for the 3.2C. Of course all of that will cost you a pretty penny, so it's up to you to decide if your computer is adequate for what you do.
The 4200+ X2 939 came out on may 31, 2005, so it can't be 6 years old yet, though it's nearly 5 years old. Those are still great chips though!
Other than the fragile socket A days, I don't think I ever saw any significant amount of dead cpus from either AMD or Intel. Both released some chips that simply never should have been made though. T-Bird 1400, P3-1.13, P3 600 (before coppermine, they were unstable stock), pretty much the entire socket 754 platform (should have been 939 only imho, s754 was just neglected), the entire socket 423 platform, etc.