what is the difference between an AMD Athlon 939 pin chip and a 940 pin chip other than 1 pin.?

Question

I am looking at a computer with an AMD 3200+ Athlon processor 940 pin box is this a good processor just for daily use? not for a lot of games.

Is the 940 pin socket upgradable?

Answer 1

Doesn't it all depend on your mobo to see which one works? Check to see what type of processor is supported by your mobo. I'm not too sure if the two are the same I'm not a AMD fan but I hope that helps.

Answer 2

To cut to the chase, a 3200+ is going to be a fine processor for everyday use.

But, the differences between socket types really depends on what type of 940 pin you are speaking of.

AMD has two sockets that are 940 pins and even they are incompatable with each other.

The 939 was the second iteration of the Athlon 64 series processor socket. This was an upgrade over the 754 pin setup and the major improvment was the addition of dual channel memory support.

Socket 940 was used for AMD Opteron and some of the earlier FX chips like the FX-52. These sockets were used mostly in buisness servers, with the FX series used for high end gaming systems. These systems required the use of ECC memory, which has an extra memory chip for Error-Correcting. This also introduced much higher costs for memory chips, making the performance benefit not as appetizing.

Socket AM2 (940 pin) is probably the socket for the processor you are looking at. This socket type introduced support for DDR2 which is a new, faster type of memory, but generally has higher latency. Keep in mind that DDR does not work on a DDR2 board.

Answer 3

The 939 reference boards use a different memory bus architecture which is thinner and allows for less memory bandwidth. The 940 indicates a step up as far as the pipelines go to ddr2 as the standard interface & the mainboard chips required to support it. Its symbolic and marketing related in nature though. They could have got the 940 processers to work in a 939 package no problem. They wanted to make sure a user could not put a new genearation chip into a old generation board, which would constrain its memory thoroughput and performance, making the chip look like the culprit of bad performance.

Answer 4

It's not terrible but the AM2 socket is much better these days. I would advise AM2 processors because if you want to upgrade your 940 there is little if no choice of upgrades. Building your own pc is the best way (if you know how)...I can quite happily help you build one to suit your budget (or build one for you) if you want.

In short : Probably not the best choice!

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