Opteron 940 now, or Intel 975 w/Pentium D & Conroe

[dspake]

Greetings all,

I have recently been put in charge of creating a DVD from 36 hours of mini-DV tape (and separate VCR audio). I am in the process of getting Adobe Premier Pro 2.0, but know that it won't run worth a damn on my Athlon 1700. So I need to upgrade. I just upgraded my wife's PC (Asrock 939 with a Athlon 64 3400, and a Nvidea 6800GT). Had to buy it all local in about two hours because my wife had a deadline to meet that evening. The reason that's relevant is that now I can splurge a bit.

I've always been a buy the best option available, and if need be, wait a bit to do it. I'm not a 'have to have the latest stuff' guy, but like to buy solid tech.

Option 1: Buy a dual CPU MB (Asus K8N-DL), slap a Dual Core Opterion 265 in it, and a gig (or two) of memory. My reasoning is that I can buy now, leave a socket open, and in a year, put another 265 and memory in it. That leaves me with a quad core system and some (limited) room for upgrade. I know it's registered DDR, and not DDR-2, but the prices of DDR-2 don't seem to be moving anywere, and with FB-DIMM's on the horizon (not to mention DDR-3), I don't see the reason to need it. Again, I lean towards the 940 socket as it's a server socket, and AMD will still support it for some time (I hope). I'll have to upgrade my Power Supply (to support the Dual CPU wattage), and a PCI Express graphics card, but those are no biggie. I don't consider AMD X2 an option given that the 939 socket is known to be dead.

Option 2: Buy an Intel 975(?) board that has been validated for Conroe. Slap a Pentium D 820 in it and wait for Conroe to come out in a 9 months to a year (I'm being realistic here). Granted it's not dual CPU, but it's upgrade path is a bit better than the "soon to be replaced" Socket 940. And if the performance numbers are as good as the tech sites say they are, I wouldn't be missing all that much performance. In this case, I'd be looking at a new Power Supply, Card and Case.

I understand that Socket F is around the corner, as is AM2. But I suspect the 'new' system stuff for these boards isn't that great, and the prices on the older stuff will drop to some degree. Even though I like AMD a great deal, I like that the CPU war is revitalizing and know that Intel might be the best way to go right now.

Other than the video edit stuff, I'm a fairly normal user (including some gaming). I work IT for the Post office, so my time on the PC at home isn't all that much. When I do use it, it's mostly SQL/PHP/Java work for the nonprofits I volunteer for. Given that I'll have Adobe Premier Pro, I'll probably use it to do some more DVD work, for said non-profits.

I appreciate you thoughts and I thank you in advance.

Dave

[jayb1234]

I think that the Intel setup will be better for what you are planning to use it for. Take a look at the 9xx series processors, they are built on 65nm instead of 90nm and will run quite a bit cooler than the 8xx series.

[jayb1234]

Here is an article about Intel shipping a conroe version of the 975 board.