Need motherboard in future
- Thread starter Marku
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No such thing as future proof, particularly in Intel's case as both their current sockets will be killed off next year. 1156 in Q1 2011 followed by 1366 in Q3. AMD's new cpu's next year "may" fit in the current AM3 boards but they will need a dramatic performance increase to keep up with Intel. Current quads can't even beat Intels socket 775 core2quads.
AMD is hard to beat in terms of value for money. It really depends what you're using the system for. If you play games and surf etc without much else, an AMD chip would be just as good as any intel, and probably only a few frames difference in the real world, whilst being significantly cheaper when you include the motherboard (think Phenom II X4 or X6).
If you do lots of video encoding, the X6 CPUs are still good, but probably just pipped by the raw power of a high end intel CPU such as the i7 930, though this has a frankly useless upgrade path, so not even close to being 'future proof'. Still, it may have all the power you need for the next few years. I mean, even a Q6600 is enough CPU for most tasks nowadays, you could buy one second hand, overclock it to at least 3.4GHz and see some really decent gains. If your motherboard supports xfire (and the PSU is up to it) you could add another 5770 for a fairly awesome rig without much extra cost.
If you do lots of video encoding, the X6 CPUs are still good, but probably just pipped by the raw power of a high end intel CPU such as the i7 930, though this has a frankly useless upgrade path, so not even close to being 'future proof'. Still, it may have all the power you need for the next few years. I mean, even a Q6600 is enough CPU for most tasks nowadays, you could buy one second hand, overclock it to at least 3.4GHz and see some really decent gains. If your motherboard supports xfire (and the PSU is up to it) you could add another 5770 for a fairly awesome rig without much extra cost.
AMD Phenom II X4's are very good value for money depending on your budget, the 955 has excellent performance at 3.2Ghz and easily overclockable to about 3.8~4.0 with a decent cooler. As for intel they arnt very future proof because of socket change like pastymuncher mentioned they are changing to socket 1366.
