One of AMD's newer chips

AMD and Intel have been in a product/price war for years. For every dedicated Intel fan you'll find as many dedicated AMD fans. Personally I'm an AMD fan mostly because I don't care for Intel's business practices and never will; you also tend to get a lot more bang for the same buck with AMD. Intel lost me as a customer years ago with the chip ID fiasco.....yeah great idea guys put a unique identifying number in the cpu.....the professed use was for commerce etc., but we all know (or should know) that anything of this nature would be abused by the government and others in all kinds of horrifying ways(chip id went on everything from internet commerce to word processing documents and other files). So then they say...oh we shut if off....then we find out later it can be reactivated remotely without the user's authorization......no way!!!! It was a bad business decision. Then we also had the microsoft/intel conspiracy for years that made efforts to keep windows from operating properly with other than Intel chips.....strike two guys, I guess you might say strike three was the incarnation of Pentium chips that had errors in their lookup tables that made engineering calculations come out with errors if there were enough decimal places (sheesh guys that's quite a fopah there).

What's all these different sockets?
Computer stuff is like everything else, every couple of years everything changes so you have to buy all new. Sometimes it's a matter of improved technology but a lot of the time it's just plain planned obsolescence. For years AMD/Intel stuck with pretty much the same cpu sockets and there was not much confusion, lately that isn't the case anymore. It seems like every day I'm reading about a new cpu type and to add to the confusion some use nearly the same identical socket and pin arrangement as a different product! Moral of the story is, if you're building your own box do your research to be sure you don't end up buying a motherboard that can't support the cpu you bought. AM2 has been out for a little while now so the boards that support it are very available in a variety of prices and configurations, you often pay for the latest chipsets and the speed of the cpus supported. Sometimes an older board can be updated to support faster chips with bios updates, but not always....so research carefully before you lay out any money.

Gaming?
Most avid gamers are poor, we all know it, we spend all our money on games, LOL. Compatibility with games is what drives us so these folks are often the last to upgrade (it all works so why mess with it and we can't afford it anyway). Most games don't require the 2.8 ghz speeds this chip is capable of. Game writers tend to build games capable of running on older tech but adding functionality and quality when the game is run with newer tech. World of warcraft is a prime example, that one will run on practically any laptop you can find today it only needs an 800 mhz cpu.

What's the difference between this chip and older 939, 754 etc. technology? ....and 32 bit versus 64 bit.
The main difference in AM2 is that the memory controller has been moved onto the cpu from the chipset on the motherboard. The reality of this arrangement is until you reach a cpu with 2.8 ghz or faster performance the memory performance is actually a bit slower. Anandtech.com has an excellent article on real world tests they performed between the AM2 and older tech. Another selling point of AM2 is multi-core (usually Dual although they do have a quad-core AM2 out these days) and larger onboard L2 cache. A core is a processor so it can be said that AM2 dual core is a mutiprocessor setup, they're just both on the same physical chip instead of separate.

32bit vs.64 bit? This is a 64 bit chip that can natively run 32 bit applications with onboard instructions. Intel 64 bit cpus need a software translation layer in windows to run 32 bit code (slower more problematic) once the world is completely 64 bit it will be just like windows 95 versus windows 3.1 all over again, I'm old enough to remember that! The only widely available to the consumer 64 bit operating systems are windows xp 64 bit and vista 64 bit. 64 bit xp was mostly a guinea pig for microsoft when they were writing vista, it's a virtually unknown OS based on windows server 2003 (it's a fantastic gaming platform, stable as heck but unfortunately currently sparsely supported).

Cooling?
You need a cpu fan rated for the speed of the chip you get. Boxed cpus come with a basic fan, if you're overclocking or running a heavily stressed system you may want a better fan than the stock one that comes with it. Newer boards support 4 pin cpu fans, AMD has a "cool n quiet" scheme that allows supported hardware to "throttle back" your cpu fan when it doesn't need to run at full speed (thus reducing noise). If you're a real hardware geek there are liquid cooling schemes available that cool better than air but are quite an investment.

Installation:
These chips install like any other AMD chip, drop it in the socket and lock down the lever. There is an arrow on one corner of the chip that helps with correct orientation.

Use a certified heat sink compound such as artic silver five or AMD's recommended thermal compound, if you bought a third party fan they often come with a tube of compound. The pad that comes on the retail fans is generally not well thought of by technicians and should be cleaned off and replaced by one of the above. The fan installs like any recent 939 fan but the bases can be a bit different. If using the stock fan no issues, but third party fans you may need to change the base plate or the locking arm around depending upon the fan.

I don't think there are any motherboard manufacturers left using jumpers to set cpu type, they're all auto detect so all you "should" have to do is install it, boot up and go into the bios to check your settings. Some motherboards may have issues with some fans and some have safety functions built in that may not allow the system to boot if the cpu fan doesn't work etc.

What am I doing with all this speed?
Mostly I game, I run an SLI setup for my current game of choice city of heros. This game can take advantage of the speed and high quality video my new system is capable of. World of Warcraft also runs well but it can't use all the power available to it and doesn't need it. AMD's math units have the reputation of being a little inferior to intel's but for what I do, I don't see any performance difference. I.e. if you run a CAD application you might see performance differences invisible to the rest of us. I don't care about running benchmarks etc., if it works well that's all I care about.

AM2 is newer technology if you're upgrading from 939 you will be buying new DDR2 memory. DDR2 is currently cheaper than DDR because it's not as widespread or they just may be producing more currently. For well under 200 bucks this chip offers nearly 3 gigahertz of power, I remember when 900 mhz was a big deal and that wasn't that awfully long ago (perhaps ten-fifteen years ago?).

Bottom line:
This is AMD's usual quality product, good bang for the buck, if you've got some of the parts already it's a fairly cheap upgrade for this chip and a new motherboard (easily under 250 bucks). Yow won't be sorry you made the investment.