Opterons and 64's

I'm going for a new system this fall. I've looked at both opterons and athlon 64's. I'm not sure which to go with....Opterons are dual core but I don't see much software using it to its full capacity yet. However it does have 1MB L2 cache on it. For examples sake I am comparing an Opteron 144 1.8 GHz socket 940 and an athlon 64 s939 3000 1.8 GHz. I'll Overclock, simply because the price jumps too much for a couple hundred MHz processor on an AMD. I think I'll get a DFI lanparty nf4 sli board with some kind of 256MB pci-e video card and about 1 Gig of ddr400. But will there be a signifcant speed difference between these two processors? For some reason I don't think there will be and there is a price difference of about $60 canadian for the opteron over the athlon. So I'm mainly thinking of going for the Athlon. What's the consensus out there in the world?.......

Generally, Opterons are used for servers and I wouldn't buy one unless I used it in SMP (using 2/4/8 processors instead of one.) They are more expensive than the Athlon 64 and require a socket 940 motherboard and expensive registered RAM. The AMD Athlon 64 X2, however, is a dual core socket 939 Athlon 64 and is very expensive.

By the way, you say that there is a high price difference for a "couple of hundred MHz on an Athlon 64." These couple of hundred MHz make a large difference in performance as A64s do process a lot per clock compared to a Pentium 4 or even an Athlon XP, hence the reason that the Athlon XP goes from 1.3GHz to 2.2GHz, whereas the Athlon 64 starts at 1.8GHz and goes up to 2.8GHz.

The DFI LanParty NForce 4 SLI - DR board is very good and has flexible overclocking options. It is used by quite a lot of people here and supports socket 939 Athlon 64s and the X2 processors. It does not support Opterons, however.

For RAM, you will definately want better speed than PC3200 (DDR400) RAM. This is if you do not wish to run the RAM on a divider, however if you run it synchronously then you will benefit from increased memory bandwidth. Look in the memory section for recommendations for what memory to use.

Well what are you going to be doing with this system? if its for gaming/typical home PC stuff you will be much better suited with the A64.