Im gonna upgrade and go 939, dual core, and would like to go the opteron path, mainly because of the OC'ing. But whats the difference between the Opteron 16x and 14x series?

Opty's below 165 are single core, 165 and up to currently 180 are dual core's.

the difference is dual (165+) and single (anything under 165) cores as was stated above. they both have advantages and disadvantages. the dual core 165's are getting expensive and hard to find, and will get to about 2.7 on air. however, the 146 's are easy to pick up, and will get 3.0ghz on air which is freaking incredible.

Pssst, Opteron 170 are faily cheap if you look on pricewatch.com

170 is just a higher clocked 165, if you really need to save the dough thats what you should go with since you can't full utilize a 10x multiplier to 3ghz anyway.

And why are you telling me this?

if you wanted to save money

Unfortunatly I live in the UK, so i will have to pay well over the odds to get it. Unless anyone knows of a (good) US site that delivers to the UK?

ouch, taxes on imports ;(

Not the taxes that do it. Over here, all the companies are happy to keep their prices at bout 150% to 200% of US prices, and none of them are bothered to compete to get prices lower. Even the companies like Ebuyer are the same, but they are about she cheapest in my opinion. So even with import taxes and shipping, getting stuff from the US is alot cheaper, unless you have to RMA it.

ouch dude, that sucks. i guess i take for granite the fact that newegg.com (refuses to send even to canada) is located in california, and that US has no taxes for shit bought online (online from the same state). do you have any relatives in the US? best bet would be to have them order it and get it shipped right over. otherwise, you could go on ebay.com, find a 165 opteron with a seller happy to sell to a brit and have that sent (lotsa 165's on ebay) otherwise, im not sure i know any international shipping sites sorry bro ;(

WRONG!
I'd rather pay the extra few bux more so I can reach ~3.0Ghz instead of 2.7Ghz.

opteron 170's do not hit 3.0ghz on air, i'd like to see some screenshots of that. they are nearly identical cores so i have no idea how you justify the sub-100 dollar price increase.

wiki.extremeoverclocking.com/w [...] _Steppings
More chances/percentage with 170 than 165 when on air.
Proven by various OC databases.

i suppose that makes sense since the 165's are rated for a meager 1.8ghz...but what makes the 170's/175's not succeptible to the cold bug?