to wait or not to wait, that is the question

[figarowa]

after four or five long years on my current box, I'm biting the bullet and finally upgrading my athlon 800 thunderbird, and have pretty much picked out most of my components such as a 450 watt PS, 2 gigs of ram, spanking new 80 gig SATA drive and such, but as for the guts I'm still wondering what to do, as of course I'm an AMD dude since the 586 days...the orig 133 AMD in my first rig. I settled on the 3700 San Diego Core, with a MSI board with the Nvidia chipset, along with a 6600 GT Vid card. the question is the chip is 320 bucks and it seems that AMD is realeasing a dual core 3800 chip august 1st for around 340. Should I wait and get the dual core goodness as this will probably be another 4 year time span before I upgrade or just stick with the 3800 64 chip? I'm still iffy on the video card end of things, as I'm still running a geforce 2 with 32 megs of ram, and I havn't been able to game at all, so I plan on finally getting in on Doom 3, Far Cry, Half Life 2, and the sim city 4000 which I havn't been able to play due to it choking my current system. I pretty much decided on spending a grand but had a nice system figured out but for the processor/mobo I'm willing to spend a bit more to make it long in the tooth so to say, as well as the video card, as I researched the ATI end of things in the x600/x700 series, and wondering how the fellers on the board have used in comparison to the 6600gt card. THanks in advance! Also unsure of what boards would be compatible with the dual core....some help on that would be appreciated

[DonVito]

I cant confirm on the new chip commin out but if it is i would definetly get the dual core if you want 4 years out of it. IMO, the 6600gt is the best 8 pipe card out there, better than the x600 or x700, it will run all those games you mentioned perfectly. In the test ive seen its been right on the heels of the x800.


http://graphics.tomshardware.com/gra...charts-02.html

this should help

[figarowa]

yeah I checked out toms earlier, but I think the site is a little biased towards some manufacturers. How much of a gain would there be between a dual core and single core, and do I have to have XP 64 bit, as i read up on some of the reviews, and [H]-OCP did not have much good to say as far as gaming is concerned as well as lack of driver support.....

[DonVito]

Games these days are only single threaded so the difference between sigle and dual is very small or theres none at all. But within four years games will very likely start being developed to use multiple cores. Where youll see a big difference today is when running multiple programs at once. So you could be playing a game and mp3 encoding music in the backround and have no slowdowns (i guess in that way itll help gaming). You will not need XP 64 bit. Amd 64's run 32 bits apps they just have the ability to run 64 bit. As stated you wouldn't want to do this now as there are no programs or drivers for 64 bit.

Yeah, i guess ive heard some rumors about toms but 6600gt is the best card for under $200.