Currently, the Opteron 248 is available for around $350, which is a good price given the performance it delivers. There is the option of going for a Socket 939 platform rather than Socket 940, which eliminates the need for registered memory, but it also limits the platform to one processor only. The Socket 939 Opteron at 2.2 GHz is available at around $300. All these processors come with a 1 MB L2 cache.

There is really not much of a difference between the Athlon 64, Athlon 64 X2 and the Opteron family. The two- and eight-channel Opterons come with four Hyper Transport links while the single- processor Opteron 100 series and the Athlon 64 come with two links only.