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The Athlon 64 3000+, A Budget Gamer's Perspective
VL contributes a link to Viperlair's budget-conscious and game-oriented review of an AMD processor that's not on the bleeding edge, but makes a good showing for the money: "For the price of the Socket-939, you can pick up an A64 3000+, K8T800 based motherboard, and a decent mid-range video card. For gamers on a budget, I think the choice is obvious."
I don't know about the US, but comparing the boxed Athlon64 3000+ against a 3.2GHz P4 I see that the P4 is ~50% more expensive.
Not to mention, it doesn't run 64-bit software.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Except AMD's roadmaps has shown that they'll continue supporting Socket 754 for the immediate future. By time it's discontinued, you'd probably be looking at a new motherboard to keep up with "modern" features anyway.
And really, since nVidia stepped in with the nForce series of chips, bringing the unified driver system from their video cards over, upgrading isn't much of an issue anymore. A friend of mine recently upgraded from an nForce2 based Athlon system to an nForce3 based Athlon 64 and it didn't require so much as a reload. Swapped the board and CPU, plugged in his drives and that was it.
That's my perspective on it anyway. Right now the price differential between Socket 754 and 939 just isn't worth it, especially given that once 939 becomes the normal commodity part, you'd probably be able to upgrade the CPU and mainboard for *less* than the price differential you'd pay now, and come out with more modern equipment.
And, of course, getting the 939 helps your computer be more future-proof. It's always nice to just be able to drop in a new processor rather than having to buy a new motherboard and transfer everything over.
I used to think that way, but not anymore.
Think back to 3 years ago, when I bought my previous motherboard and cpu. My motherboard doesn't have SATA, or USB 2.0, or firewire. It doesn't have gigabit ethernet. I just bought a motherboard last week that has all of that for $105.
Spending more than $100 extra to be "future proof" doesn't make sense to me because by the time I want to upgrade my cpu, a new motherboard with all the bells and whistles that weren't available 3 years ago can be had for a pittance.
If I bought a new CPU every year, then it might be worth it, but I wait 2-3 years between upgrades.