The year is 2005, following the P4 Era, the Prescott debacle, and the failure of NetBurst to take off for intel, AMD was riding the 64-bit wave with the Athlon 64 lineup, specifically the Socket 939 processors which have always held a special place in my heart. The mighty AMD FX line, these things were just *dominating* the charts and benchmarks at the time, all over the covers of Max PC and the like. To me, they represented a milestone in compouting between the modern era and the legacy era.

For me personally, I was running a P4 478 2.66 Ghz Northwood until March 2006, when I bought an Asus A8V and an Athlon 64 3700+ San Diego, both of which I still have today. It was truly a new era of Windows XP performance, I was a college student at the time and it was about all I could afford to just keep up with the times. I still had a 9700 Pro as my primary video card, being AGP, so I chose the A8V with KT800 Pro chipset and AGP in order to avoid upgrading to PCIe at the time. A common story for many in this era! I only used this build until July 2008 when I upgraded to a P5Q, E8400 Wolfdale, and an ATi HD4850 when I had a little more chase for parts, again proving to be a solid build for about 5 years on!!! That build needs a revisit some day as well.

Anyway, back to the Athlon 64 days. As I mentioned, I still have the Asus A8V motherboard, which unfortunately was caught in the great capacitor plauge with nasty UCC KZG Caps all over it! In 2007-2008 I recall the board being a little unstable in gaming and now I know why! I always thought the K8T800 was just a buggy chipset.

I kept the board in storage for years never quite being able to let it go but not really having a plan for what to do with it. So it moved from box to box, bin to bin, house to house until finally earlier this year I decided to revisit Athlon 64. I have had a P4 3.4 Ghz Northwood rig running since 2017 which I had restored from parts I had for many years, but it just wasn't quite scratching my itch for SPEED. This A64 rig will hopefully deliver a nice 20-50% performance increase over the P4 Rig, I will also be using it in the short term for video digitization and archival, as my family has a couple hundred VHS-C and Hi8 tapes that need to be converted. I will be using a 9600 AIW for the video conversion and an X1950 Pro for gaming.

Specs:
Motherboard options:
Asus A8V Recapped with Rubycon electrolytic caps and Panasonic Polymer caps for VRMs
Asus A8V Deluxe also recapped

Processors in my collection:
A64 3500+
A64 3700+ San Diego
A64 4000+ San Diego
A64 X2 4400+ San Diego
A64 X2 4400+ San Diego

RAM:
OCZ PC3200 2-3-2-5, 2Gb (2x 1GB)

Video card options:
ATi 9600 AIW, bought New in Box recently on ebay
ATi/Powercolor X1950 Pro, found 2 of them as manufacturer refurbed several years ago, white box.

Sound Card:
Audigy 2 ZS (obviously)

Power Supply:
Corsair HX520W

Case:
Fractal Focus G, Gunmetal Grey
2x 140mm Green LED fans
1x 120mm Green LED Fan
Green CCFLs, maybe a little splash of orange from an LED strip as an homage to AMD's A64 era

Side note: I had found a mint condition Lian Li PC-7B Plus but it seems USPS may have lost it, so I'll proceed with the Focus G build. A nice option for retro builds!

Adding an Asus DVD drive, an intel 250 gb SSD for XP, and a 320 GB 7200 RPM WD Blue SATA I drive for storage. Debating adding an IDE/SD card adapter for a 98SE option as well.

Looking forward to sharing the build with you!