A friend is offloading their rig.

Main components are (about 18months old)
cpu: AMD Opteron 170 Denmark 2.0GHz 2 x 1MB L2 Cache Socket 939 Dual Core
mobo: ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe Socket 939 NVIDIA nForce SPP 100 ATX AMD
vga: Gigabyte GV-NX62128DP NVIDIA GeForce 6200 128Mb PCIe
Zalman CNPS 7700 Al-Cu cooler
2gb DDR400 ram

Im undecided whether to buy this or buy newer more current gear such as (note this is only an example)

AMD Athlon 64 X2 3600+ AM2 & Biostar TForce 550 Motherboard
Arctic Cooling Alpine 64 Heatsink/Fan
Connect3D Radeon X1900 GT
1GB DDR2 667 RAM

What is the difference between the older Opteron 170 Dual Core cpu's and the more recent Athlon 64 X2 6400+ cpus, or any other similar units?

From my initial take, i think the older unit was certainly top of the line in 2005 early 2006, but my choice is dependant on what represents better value!

This rig would either replace my HTPC or desktop. Their current configs are show below.

To give you an idea, the replacement system listed above would wither be used as replacement build for my HTPC or to replace my desktop. their details are below current HTPC config cpu:Intel P4 3.0c 512KB, 800MHz, Socket 478 Northwood Hyper Threading cpu, mobo: Asus P4P800 E-Deluxe vga: Asus 9600xt/TVD current desktop config cpu. P4 2.4 mobo: Asus P4S800 All in one vga: onboard vga The Desktop get used daily, but the HTPC does the hardest work with Mpeg encoding and DVD ripping and creating. and burning. Which ever system is left, if will be turning into a file/media/internet cache server. Thanks in advance for all contributions to this thread.