It's the year 2004 and Socket A/462 is still around in larger percentages then expected by most people "in the know". The move towards AMD's own Athlon 64 is happening, but very slow due to the high prices and the constant changes of the new platform. If you want to buy a new future-proof and upgradeable A64 PC you need to invest in a Socket 939 motherboard and CPU with support for PCI-E graphics boards. As far as I know these setups are very expensive and do not offer performance increases which warrant the high cost.

So here we are with yet again an AMD Socket A roundup. Last time in December 2003 we saw that the field was dominated by the Thermalright SP-97 heatsink which sports heat pipe technology. Nowadays a lot of manufactures have caught up and we have a wide variety of heatsinks available which are based upon the successful heat pipe tech.