Not sure where to post this cause its not really a problem, but can someone explain to me the benefits of this new AMD socket. Is it worth it to upgrade now or wait till the socket is developed more i.e. when the cache becomes 1mb or more. Is the DDR 400 and 800 really that much of a speed boost? Thanks in advance. X
DDR2, and the higher-scaleability it provides is one. Right now, AM2 doesn't really offer anything for current S939 users. The performance is pretty much what you'd get with a similar S939 chip. However, future improvements to the Athlon64 architecture will be solely available for Socket AM2. Additionally, AM2 motherboards really haven't hit the reviewers just yet, so I wouldn't recommend jumping on-board just yet. I'm sure it's going to be fine in most cases, but a lot of the motherboards are going to be using the nForce 500 chipsets and the ATi RD580/SB600 chipsets. While I don't forsee any major issues, if you're with a S939 system, there's not much of an incentive to jump to AM2 right now. If you were still on Socket A, or even Socket 754 maybe, the jump could be pretty beneficial. However, given that most S939 boards feature PCIe, there's not as much of a need to get into this platform given the major changes like PCIe and widespread adoption of SATA.
I've read some reviews and the results aren't that much better, in a magasine I read that AM2 wasn't any faster (sometimes slower) than 939 - they said it was because of the extremely high latencies of the DDR2 RAM - I'm not sure if that's the only reason why but that's what the magasine said.
DDR2 will eventually be needed as DDR does have limits on how fast it can go. For someone doing a new build, AM2 would be a better move, but for people with PCIe and Socket 939, you're a fool to make the move. The point behind AM2 isn't for a copious performance gain. It's not uncommon to see transition to new memory give noticeably worse performance...which was the case with SDR to DDR, but that was primarily due to how chipset companies were still getting used to DDR.
AM2 is more of a transition for AMD than it is for the consumer at this moment in time. DDR was being pushed to its limits, and eventually they had to switch to DDR2 despite the latency issue. I'm sure that as the platform matures performance will increase, but not just yet.
No, AM2 sockets are 940 pins (not to be confused with Socket 940 - they're not compatible) - also AM2 requires DDR2 and Socket 939 requires DDR so they're not compatible
