A Land Far Away

Just askin for input

maybe. Intel just dropped prices on lots of chips this week, could be a opening salvo. However, I don't think Barcelona is supposed to be released until Q3 or Q4, right?

Right.

Core2Duos will fall further more than likely, but at this moment, regardless of anything else, are outstanding value. Buy a 4300 for $100? Now that's madness. You can overclock that without much difficulty at all and make it faster than any existing AMD CPU (with the right mobo and RAM, of course.)

Right ...they pushed them back to Q3 at least. They are promising speed and reduced power consumption so I am expecting Intel to not only counter with info on their newer chips...but hit them with a lower price. They already have the market share so they can afford to take a hit on a basement price.

Now...can I wait that long to get a system....

No.

Get one now.

And for good reasons, not materialistic ones...sure, they're good as well. Get a motherboard that supports the Quad Core line (like the Gigabyte DS3 Pro), which will cost you $150 or less. Stick a $100 4300 in it with some 667 or higher RAM (the ram will cost you $150).

Give it a gentle overclock (or not...won't matter). You'll be quite surprised at the speed increase if you do any of the following:

- Photoshop
- Toolsetting
- Audio Editing
- Video Editing
- File Management
- Gaming (but video card is the real deal here)

Now I'm an AMD fanboy and to my mind Intel was the devil for many years. But the Core2Duo's and Core2Quad's are such a boost from the X2's, and so fricken cheap, that it's really just worth jumping in. Upgrade paths are really very hard to avoid with the current range.

I personally stick to AMD always, so im just waiting until amd bring the new stuff in that will see intel go bye bye again

Here's a thought though...for single-threaded apps, multicore doesn't really give much of a performance boost - just makes it easier to multitask. For multi-threaded apps, 4 cores is significantly better than two. I'd say if what you got now still feels adequate, stick with it till quad cores...even if the quads are too pricey when they release, they'll knock down the prices of the dual cores. If you can hold off till the fall, I bet the quads will have settled in price a bit.

Myself, 08 might be a good time to upgrade, depending on what I can get past my comptroller.

Going to be sticking AMD myself, still running an Athlon XP 3000+ myself, and I need to save money for a new rig anyhow. (Thinking this fall or next spring).