Opteron 140 setup

OK... so without this being a completely open ended question, is there anything stopping me from picking up an Asus SK8N and an Opteron 140 at this point?

AMD64 Windows isn't... since it will probably run Gentoo Linux.

Cash... well, this setup certainly won't be cheap but I'm thinking I'll probably sell my dual XP setup off to finance (part of) this upgrade.

Maybe I am misinformed, but the dual channel memory controller on the Opteron interests me far more than the Athlon64's (please notify me if I am misinformed).

Any good articles to read out there on this topic?

The SK8N has issues at the moment with both its IDE drivers and the AGP bridge. Whether these will be able to be corrected with a driver fix is unknown. Also, shooting for a 140 may be a bad decision since you have no real headroom for overclocking the thing (these aren't your XP chips!). I am in the position where I will be probably putting a dual 246+ system together in the next couple of months and I am going to hold off until at least November when the new NForce3 revision (250) comes out ... hopefully many problems on the single CPU board will be fixed in that revision, and it opens me up for some SMP goodness.

BTW, when the heck are the gentoo guys going to come out with a working AMD64 implementation? That's the other reason I'm waiting ... I don't like the idea of installing an OS that is mostly broken and requires crude hacks to make it function ... if I wanted that I'd run windows. I'm still waiting for a proper stage1 download ....

Well, dunno, but I wouldn't consider goin from dual xps to a single 140 an upgrade. Btw, the Athlon 64 FX51's have the dual channel mem controllers, and they seem like they overclock pretty well. If the 140 is able to overclock like the others, then it may be worth it, depending on if you can convince JCviggen to let you have a copy of the hacked bios he used for the unlocked multipliers. Nforce 3 chipset.

Actually, I think these have good OCing headroom. I remember a vague reference I think over at XBit to a guy who managed to get an early stepping to 2.25 GHz, so the potential is there. I'd just wait to make sure that the new C steppings (the one the A64FX has that Ace's got to 2.8 GHz) are common and easy to get, which would also give a chance for the SK8N to be ironed out and for price drops if the x48 comes out, too.