My favorite topic.
When are you buying?
For the CPU, deffinitely go Intel C2D. Right now dual core is the best for games as multi core are not largely supported while dual cores are. Dual Cores overclock to much higher speeds than a quad, so with current game they are more capapable. Basically, Quad cores only act as Dual cores for most current games. However the newer games will all start to support multicore UT III and Crysis for example will perform better with Quads I believe. In any case Intel and AMD are at eachothers throats with aggressive pricing so it' s a really good time for a PC upgrade.
Intel just released a new revised CPU set (minor upgrade). Basically they have a 1333fsb instead of 1066fsb which doesn' t seem to do much in terms of performance. These are the ones that end in 50 like the E6750 or the E6850. Don' t be sold on the Fsb alone, Intel is only setting themselves up for the new motherboads coming out the same way that AMD went AM2 after 939. Almost no performance gain clock per clock but prices dropped. You have to be careful with these as you will likely need to update your motherboard in order to use them. Right now the best deal seems to be the Q6600 as it dropped in price this week by half!
http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=22211&vpn=BX80562Q6600&manufacture=Intel It' s a Quad core, overclocking this to 3Ghz will make this thing scream. That' s what I would get along with a third party cooler. If you go water cooling this thing will be a beast.
Quads are clocked lower because you have twice the CPUs, twice the transistors means a lot more heat thus lower clocks. That' s why going water cooling for Quad cores is such a great idea.
ATI ***ed up this gen for the graphics cards and were forced to leave out key components in the GPU architecture so the 2900XT sucks for texturing and doing AA. In a few months the revised models with architectual change will come out that will fix these issues. This should make ATI a viable option as the 2900 series does have some more advanced technology over the 8800 series especially with DX10 games that make heavy use of programable shaders. The 8800GTS, 8800GTX, or 8800 ULTRA are the only current options for high end though.
I don' t know about physics cards. I know they do physics better than any CPU or GPU will ever be capable of doing, when they' re supported. Don' t fool yourself into thinking that you can completely compensate for a physics card using a CPU or GPU, not in any way that' s economically efficient. The problem is that the games need to be programmed to use it. Not a whole lot of developers seem to want to start supporting the card when the install base is so small, at the same time no one wants to buy the card when no one is supporting it.
Personally I would buy one except that everyone is saying that PCI slots are on their way out, to be replaced with PCI-E. Physics cards are on PCI slots, so I don' t want to buy one and have to buy another one in two years.
However if UT III supports the card as Epic said the game would a year ago, I' ll buy one. Untill I see it with my own eyes, I have no reason not to wait. I' m excited about advanced physics but I don' t recommend buying this untill it properly supported by a game you will buy. So far the only game that it supports properly is Cell factor, which is a free game. On the other hand these things are so cheap, it' s not a big risk. maybe if you have extra money burning in your pocket. I would wait though.
As for motherboards. If you can I would wait for the X38' s. They' ll support the next wave of Intel CPU' s making a future upgrade easier and maybe cheaper. They also have dual 16x PCI-E 2.0 (with double the bandwidth to the videocards). The current P35' s are basically mid range of the X38' s. If you need a mobo today I would get the P35 for a single card setup or an Nforce I680 for dual card setup. But like I said I would wait for the X38 mobo' s. My GPU is held back by my CPU and I think I' m having driver issues with my AM2 mobo but I' m still going to wait for the X38 chipset before going C2D. ASUS is a good brand.
< Message edited by Agent Ghost -- 26 Jul 07 0:30:27 >