Received my Opteron 165 and Scythe Ninja heatsink last night. It didn’t take long before my system was torn apart and the new parts were installed. Installation was straigtforward, but damn, that heatsink should not be advertising that it has easy to use clips.

So is there an improvement moving from a single-core 2.0 GHz chip to a dual core 1.8? I definitely saw it. The entire system feels smoother, and I can continue to use my system while performing heavy tasks. I’m sure I’d see even more improvements if I were compiling stuff in Gentoo, but for now, the ability to continue working as normal while playing with 4 GB ISO images, running Qemu, and burning stuff, makes it a great upgrade.

Next up in the performance upgrade pipeline is some DDR500 memory. With some simple overclocking this CPU can run like an FX60!