Thanks for the excellent article, MM. It really clears up a lot of misconceptions I had about ECC RAM and where the AMD-64 line is headed.

I'm a gamer who just bought a used system based on the Athlon FX-51 in an Asus SK8V mobo... the system is pretty much loaded (1GB DIMM of Kingston ECC, 160GB SATA + 40GB RAID 0 HDDs, 256MB Radeon 9800), I got it for $1150, it seemed at the time like a great deal but after reading your article, part of me wonders if maybe the guy was dumping it because he knows the upgrade options will be limited for Socket 940.

Can you or anyone else hazard a guess as to how many more Opterons will come out for this socket, since Athlon FX is moving over to Socket 939? If some Socket 940 Opterons ever get up around 3GHz a year or two from now then I'd have a pretty clear upgrade path.

-Adam in Philly