939 motherboards

[RangerXML]

AM2 really isn't much of an upgrade over 929 (something along the lines of 2 pines and DDR2 which AM2 can't even fully utilize), intel's 775 is something else.

As for chip, if you can find a 939 Athlon 64 X2 chip, thier pretty good. I went from a 4000+ single core to a 4600+ dual and it was great. They are however very difficult to find and I was fortunate to be working on a dying computer with on where the owner offered to sell it to me.

[Fumi]

... i guess the best you can get is a dual core 4800 x2, although you certainly won't be current-gen and won't have the power to play any new games at a reasonable level of detail / fps

That's nonsense.

Get past all the impressive synthetic benchmarks and you'll find that Intel chips don't really run games that much better than AMD chips. Most of the time the percentage difference is almost negligible. A 2.6GHz dual core AMD performs almost identically to an E6600.

There is virtually no distinction between an AM2 and a 939 pin cpu. They're both just regular old Athlon 64's; one just has a different memory interface, the cores however remain the same.

An Opteron 185 and an FX-60 are identical. The only difference is the FX's unlocked multiplier. They both run 2.6GHz, they both have 1MB cache and they both can't use two cores to play battlefield... but that's ok, neither can a Core 2 Duo. :p

FX-60's are hard to find and expensive; however, Opterons have dropped a lot in price over at newegg. AMD just made a new batch of them which clock very nicely. I'm running a 185 at 3GHz on default vcore. So, from one 939 pin guy to another, I can assure you any talk about having to play games at a lesser resolution or lesser quality than our Core 2 brothers is pure crap.