I want to OC my 3000+

[hackman2007]

Well, if I got another processor I would want a dual core processor (since this one is single core), but all the X2's are gone and the cheapest Opteron is $155 at Newegg. Will all Socket 939 motherboards support these Opterons? Because if so, I'll probably just get an Opteron since they are dual core too.

[gvblake22]

Most all s939 motherboards with the latest BIOS should support the Opterons. Well, let me put it this way: I haven't heard of any boards yet that didn't at least boot up with the s939 Opterons.

As to upgrading, that is gonna have to be a personal decision. Two processors (dual core vs. single core) of the same architecture family with the same amount of cache per core and the same clock speed will perform about the same in most situations, particularly gaming. Where you will see dual cores perform better than single core processors is if you were trying to manage a lot of processor dependant tasks at once or if you were using an application that was coded to be multithreaded to take advantage of the extra processing core (but those still seem to be few and far between). Personally, I went from a s939 Venice 3200 to an AM2 X2 3800 (which is basically two Venice cores with a DDR2 memory controller instead of DDR) and while there wasn't a noticeable difference in how fast things ran, I do notice that opening multiple programs up at once and running several things at once is snappier and more responsive with the dual core than single core. Keep in mind too that I'm using the same amount of RAM, but it is DDR2-800 and the video card has been upgraded from a 6600GT to an X1900GT, so I can't really tell you if there was any difference in gaming performance because it is just not a fair comparison).