Getting the max out of an AMD Socket 939 in 2020
When I went to university my parents bought me a new PC. It was 2006, AMD’s processors successfully competed with Intel’s in performance and cost cheaper than the last ones. So AMD’s Athlon 64 was no brainer. The PC’s specifications were an Athlon 64 3000+, 2x512Mb RAM and Radeon x1600 PRO. It was more than enough to play games on medium settings and learn programming from time to time. Couple of years later, I bought a laptop that could easily handle Counter-Strike 1.6 and helped me study. So I forgot about this computer until 2020.
I wanted to test it and get the maximum performance out of the Athlon 64 platform. I’ve bought a more powerful CPU, more RAM and also a GPU to play old games on max settings.
But before I could start the tests, I had to reinstall Windows XP 32 bit. This was painful because the disks with the drivers were lost, the default browser could not open the search engine and even Windows wouldn’t activate for a couple of days. So I had to download all the necessary programs and drivers from another PC paying attention to the needed Windows XP support.
Geekbench 2.4.3 results for Athlon 64 3000+ and 2 GB of DDR1 RAM.
Athlon 64 x2 4600+ and 2 GB of RAM.
As expected, there is a huge difference in performance but the best indication is YouTube. For the single-core processor, it could not handle 360p videos and only 240p videos worked correctly. In contrast for two cores it can process 720p.
The next step is overclocking. I haven’t tried this before, so I spent some time getting familiar with the different options. In general, proper overclocking for socket 939 is difficult. I chose to pay attention to multiplier only. The Athlon 64 3000+ performance increase was around 33% which helped it handle 360p videos.
Athlon 64 x2 4600+ results were modest and was a 6%.
At the end of the day overclocking killed my MOBO and I had to buy another one.
After that, I tried to maximize the RAM amount and faced a serious issue. Windows XP 32 bit does not work with 4 GB of RAM. Fortunately, I had a disk with Windows 7 64 bit. The installation process was flawless, but Windows still showed only 3.25 GB of RAM.
A couple of hours later I changed BIOS config which allowed the motherboard to use all of the RAM memory.
This still led to yet another issue: Athlon 64 can’t handle 4x1GB memory sticks using max DRAM frequency (400 MHz). At that point, I started to appreciate modern hardware which does not have so many restrictions.
Last but not least, was to play some old games, which I couldn’t play a many years ago. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 were the best targets for me. I left 2x1GB memory sticks and purchased a GeForce 8800 GTS. It was a complete fail because GPU was broken. So I bought the GeForce 9800 GTX+. This extremely noisy and powerful GPU allowed me to play these games on max settings without any problems. I haven’t even tried to play newer games due to the GPU usage for these particular games being around 20% and CPU at 100%.
Overall I’m very satisfied with the AMD Socket 939 upgrading experience and with the fact that this PC could be used as a media centre and retro PC in 2020.
