Upgrade Dilemma

[thumper]

Ok guys here goes:
I’m currently running the following system:

Intel D820 2.8Ghz Dual Core
Intel Desktop D955XBK motherboard
2 x 1Gb of DDR2
X1800 XL

Although this system kicks photoshop & premiere’s ass its not so hot on the gaming front – and although I like to able to work on my home rig I have a laptop for that and games are what’s important at home

A read into this makes it obvious that AMD is the better option for gamers at least at the moment – but Conroe is on the horizon & I have heard that the D955XBK may well support it - can anyone confirm or deny this?

So here in lies the dilemma – do I just sell on the dual core stuff and get a faster (gaming~wise at least) 939 system or wait a little while (how long?) and fingers crossed get an even faster system by just removing the D 820 and dropping in a Conroe..

Right now I should be able to sell my current CPU, MB & DDR2 for around ~£300
So I would then have that much to spend on a similar AMD CPU/MB & DDR setup …
I was thinking the 3700+ San Diego + Arctic Freezer 64
Not sure about motherboards – crossfire might be useful – maybe the Abit AT8
& 1gb or ideally 2gb or DDR2 – Geil Value?

Alternatively I could wait for Conroe and just swap my CPU out (if the board supports it when released).

What would you do?
Any advice, as ever, much appreciated

 

[semi-pro waster]

Have you tried overclocking your CPU as in theory at least that shouldn't be a bad system at all.

If you do really want to replace it then you should be able to get something like a 3700 San Diego or Opteron 146 + motherboard + 2gb Ram for ~£300 give or take. You definitely do not want DDR2 for A64 as it won't be supported until AM2. Geil Value is good stuff and capable of a mild overclock at least, A64s can run on a divider quite happily I believe as well so that isn't much of an issue.

 

[thumper]

As far as i know the motherboard doesn't offer any overclocking options ....

The main reason i figured the AMD system would be better was viewing Tom's Hardwares CPU comparison thingy - where in all game benchmarks the D820 was in the bottom quarter of the table and the 3700+ in the top quarter ... obviously in encoding and stuff the pentium was better but its seems that so few games actually take advantage of the 2nd core rather than just supporting it - read not breaking when a dual core cpu runs it

am i wrong in thinking this ?