Replace 939 Board or build new?

[NoSoup4You]

New rig's are so cheap now, and offer huge performance over s939, even more if you're willing to overclock. E5200 - $70, cheap overclocking mobo - $80, 4 Gig's RAM $35, GTS 250 1GB - $120

But that s939 board for $36 shipped, you really can't go wrong. Nice find!

 

[GeezerMan]

Originally posted by: NoSoup4You
New rig's are so cheap now, and offer huge performance over s939, even more if you're willing to overclock. E5200 - $70, cheap overclocking mobo - $80, 4 Gig's RAM $35, GTS 250 1GB - $120

But that s939 board for $36 shipped, you really can't go wrong. Nice find!

I see people buying quad cores at the big box stores to surf the web and watch movies on. I have to admit that 99.99% of the time I use my Q6600 just to surf and watch some videos on too. I just enjoy building them. Mine does get a workout when I use it for video compression, but that's not really often. I'm not really a gamer, except for the hour a week I play BF2 in solo mode. For the general public, a 939 is still ample, but there is no point in putting much money into one when better hardware can be cheaper.

 

[jelifah]

I wonder if a couple people here might have purchased the Foxconn board as well? I went back to make the purchase and of the 3 or 4 boards, from $36 guy last night, only 1 was left!

I'm going to go out and get a 4850 to pair with this board, sell the old x800xt and 3850 (AGP), and then when I do get ready to make the move off of 939 I can take my time looking for the right CPU/Mobo combo without taking the hurt of the video card price along for the ride.

GeezerMan and I are on the same page. My old system ran everything fine, and Bioshock/Left 4 Dead were good enough. To be honest the most stressful thing on my plate is video recoding, TiVO files to mpeg/DVD, and whether it takes 2 hours or 30 minutes it's irrelevant, I still get up from my PC and come back later.

 

[GeezerMan]

well. if I was doing CPU intensive video work often, I would want a quad core for sure. The old 939 being a 95nm process, is less energy efficient than newer platforms too. I built up a HTPC last year using an AM2 ECS motherboard and 4200+ X2 CPU. Both board and CPU cost 60.00.
I guess I keep my old 939 out of nostalgia mainly. It was the first platform I built a PC on.

It's nice to have my Q6600. As far as upgrading the Q6600, I won't need to do that for years.

 

[PingSpike]

I've got a socket 939 rig that my wife uses. Its still a great rig, but I'm probably going to break it down and upgrade it for the hell of it. I don't know how much the parts go for, but I've got DDR2 ram piling up in my house now from hot deals. I'm kind of hanging on to the asrock 939-dual board just because its unique...but I really don't need the AGP anymore.

 

[Dadofamunky]

Heh. we have two S939 systems running in our house. Absolutely no issues with either of them. My wife's is a 3800+ OCd to 2.5 GHz, quiet, not a single crash since I built it recently. They're still plenty for most productivity tasks, even pretty high-end stuff like Illustrator and Photoshop. You just can't buy them anymore since Intel's and AMD's business models don't include keeping older chips on the market for ten years.

 

[OCedHrt]

I have a S939 motherboard for sale view my thread

 

[TurtleCrusher]

My parent's computer (built from spare parts from a spare computer haha) is a s939 3500+ overclocked to 2.3ghz with 1GB of DDR400 (2.5-3-3-5) and a x1650pro 512mb. There is absolutely no program they have that makes the computer sluggish at all. Word, Excel, online games, movies, etc. These are still VERY capable systems.

Seriously with those games i would not recommend upgrading at the moment. S939 (epecially a DC opteron) can still hang with the big boys. I don't think you need to upgrade the 3850. I had an X2 4200+ and a 3850 and they were quite the pair! Only when i got a much faster quad did i feel the itch to upgrade it.

If you can, get a 4830. Anything else your dollar completely loses in a price/performance situation.

 

[jelifah]

A lot of this just came down to economics. I was having trouble finding an AGP based S939 board so when I was pointed to the Foxconn by Geezerman I thought 'what the heck'.

I am confident my 3850 AGP will sell for $100, and I still needed to sell my old x800xt. So between the two I could justify spending ~$200.

At the risk of being redundant, once I get the system running again I'll dive in to researching the purchase of a new MoBo/CPU and I can bring the 4870 along for the transition!

We'll see what happens when the parts start arriving later this week.

 

[jelifah]

The Foxconn motherboard, and a 4870 PCI-Express video card, did the trick and everything is up and running.

Thanks for the input and help.

 

[Dadofamunky]

Neat! Talk about squeezing more life out of what really is still a very useful CPU. Awesome.

 

[jelifah]

While it took a SECOND PCI-Express to two Molex power adapter to get the video card up I am quite happy with the results. Bioshock now flies at 1600 x 1200, which is the max my monitor supports, where before it stuttered a little with the 3850.

That's not to say that I don't still have upgrade envy. Those E8500's are a thing of beauty, and it looks like they'd cut my power usage down by 30-40 watts!

But, for a $36 quick fix, I'm quite pleased.

 

[HunterDT]

Take this as a sign the computer gods wants you to upgrade. Lol