We all know the Opteron 165 is an excellent chip, but I'm surprised by the pricing comments by the author. Yes, the Opteron 165 was priced at one time below $300. However, that is no longer the case. The cheapest Opteron 165s (retail box) available are now in the $330 range while price reductions on the X2 side now have the A64 X2 3800 at $295 (retail box). Sure, I'd get an Opteron 165 if it cost less or even the same as the X2 3800, but the truth is at the moment you'll pay $35+ more for the Opteron. That's enough for me to stick with a X2 3800 for my next dual-core purchase. If you know of a secret supplier of Opteron 165s below $300 please do share!

Very good review. Thanks.

Good review, but you left the potential of the overclocking results why it is mainly buyed by enthusiast unillustrated.

I was expecting to see the performance of a 291fsb opty165 included in the graphs compared to the stock opty 165. possibly even some 4GHz 920 thrown in for good measure.

this is what the enthusiast community is interested in, these results.

see what overclocking yields into performance between the 9xx series from intel and the opty165.

could you please include these results in there?

tnx, still a good review, but just missing a bit the point of the opty's 165 essence these days.

Excellent review. I appreciate that the 3800+ was chosen for comparison to the 165. Except for games, the extra 1 MB L2 appears worthless. We can hope the next-gen A64 adopts the shared L2 cache architecture, similar to Yonah, with 1 MB L2 in total.

278$ Right, I´d love to buy them for that price, however in Sweden, resellers tend to take advantage of popular products and overcharge, obviously nobody is forcing you to buy one, but if I have the choice of getting one from a known resellers vs some dodgy ebay brat from across the ocean its pretty simple :(
I ordered mine yesterday and paid 440$ (forex exchange rate) and on a sidenote I shelled out 288$ for the dfi expert motherboard and a couple of weeks ago 427$ for a pair of 1GB Crucial ballistix pc4000 dimms, and its supposed to be a free market, m***********s.

I don't understand why you didn't post any results of the OC 165, or the other CPU's for that matter. So a potential buyer can get a better understanding of these CPU's potential.

So where's the gaming performance benchmarks while overclocked?!??

How's one to know the true value of a massively overclockable CPU if the difference in FPS or benchmarks is not considered?

Bbbbaaaadddd Xbit - You should know better!

If you want to see what an Opteron 165 performs like OCed to 2.6ghz, then go check out the FX-60 review.

I see you have a Toledo core...but where are they sold? I'm coming across the Denmark core.

What happened to the game performance tests with the overclocked Opteron 165? Im not interested in how it performs against other processors when its in standard speed...

Crap article...

Hi!

Since I am from Denmark, this must be the cpu for me.....!

I have a Q concerning how to OC the Opteron. I have a DFI NF4 Ultra D motherboard, and:

Where in BIOS do you lower the HyperTransport clock frequency multiplier, (and to what level to get approx 2.4 Ghz), and where do you increase the memory frequency divider, (and again to what level to reach 2.4 Ghz)?

Could nTune from nVidia be a simpel solution?

Thanks in advance

Voldsdale, really, RTFM. :P
Google is your friend, and so is your motherboard manual.

why did you only 1024x768 res :( very annoying, LCD users demand 1280x1024 testing

IMHO Xbitlabs should have made this review allready back in the start of october 2005, when the Opteron 165 became a hot issue. It is only coming now -4 months off the beat! But better late than never.

I would also have liked to see how far the Opteron 165 can overclock with a high end aircooler. The overclocking thread at "Anandtech forum" shows results from 2.6-2.8 GHz, but it would have been nice to have a valid Xbitlabs overclock in comparison.

Very interesting. I see that the 930 will go down in price to 209.00 at end of April. Why not rerun your test with the 940 and 950 since they will be the same price of Opteron 165 and lets see how the 165 stacks up to to 940 and 950.. Also can the 930 or above be overclocked ?

No, detailed benchmarking on overclocked clock speed

Where do you get an Opteron 165 for $278? I know I'm gonna write my friends a dumb pamphlet on how to get an FX-62 system with a highly OC'ed 7800 GT for $1180 (that includes PC-4000 RAM, mobo, Scythe SCNJ-1000 cooler, Zalman VF700 GPU cooler,7800 GT, Western Digital 250 GB SATA hard drive, NEC 16x DVD burner, Antec TP II 550w PSU and $330 Opteron 165 from Newegg).

This is a beautiful article. I thank you, this is incredibly useful info for someone wanting to get a LOT more for MUCH less.

I'll soon have my own quasi FX-60...

If there is such a place as heaven, you have earned your spot with this article. And this comes from an atheist.

NICE AND SIMPLE REVIEW EASILY UNDERSTOOD . ENGLISH ALMOST PERFECT

It's all good, but the 165 retails for over $325, which is $50 more than $278 quoted here, and Intel D920 is $258 which is 20 % less than the similar performance 165. Nevertheless AMD is still my favorite and looking those prices up is the first time I actually looked the Intel way.