Hi
My current PC is on its last legs for playing anything like the latest games (P4 2.26 and a ti4600, cease laughing now) and I am looking for a significant upgrade. My budget is about £1400 and needs to include XP SP2.
I won't be reusing any parts from my current PC, though I might add the HDD as a third drive to new machine if space permits.
I've been reading about Conroe and AMD2 and there certainly seem to be some significant performance improvements coming from Intel (just to be clear I don't actually care either way about Intel and AMD, I like the competition and just want bang for buck, currently AMD seems the processor group of choice) and so was considering waiting to see what happens with those processors.
I am not particualrly experimental with PC hardware (I don't mind a bit of overclocking but nothing drastic) and so, as someone who most definitely won't be an early adopter, I wonder if the wait for the release of something no one has yet really seen is actually worth it. Any views on that would be appreciated.
In the meantime I am looking for a decent spec, I really only want to upgrade memory/graphics cards and that sort of thing over the next 2-3 years. I would prefer a CPU 'out of the box' that I don't have to overclock unless I want to (which probably takes out Opterons, though it depends how 'easy' it is to overclock them on air with a decent cooler). I don't need a new monitor, keyboard nor mouse as yet, so the budget for the case and everything in it is £1400 including win xp sp2.
I am slightly concerned about dual cores as I keep reading about having to run them through the single core in some games (not sure if this slows things down) - certainly they seem to be of the future but not very now.
If you guys could offer a spec that would be appreciated and give me a good idea about whether to wait or if what can be had now would keep me happy.
Purpose of the PC is working from home (which lets face it I could practically do on a 486 if it would run MS Bloatware, so most things will handle that) and then of course gaming (ranging from fps to rpgs etc). I'd like to, for a short while until everything in my shiny new machine goes out of date (after 2 weeks heh), be able to run the newer things at a good rate and really see the benefit of a fairly costly upgrade. Ideally I'd prefer Nvidia graphics because I have had horrible Ati driver issues in the past (admittedly a long time ago), but I am open to all suggestions.
Apologies for long post, advice and help appreciated.
My current PC is on its last legs for playing anything like the latest games (P4 2.26 and a ti4600, cease laughing now) and I am looking for a significant upgrade. My budget is about £1400 and needs to include XP SP2.
I won't be reusing any parts from my current PC, though I might add the HDD as a third drive to new machine if space permits.
I've been reading about Conroe and AMD2 and there certainly seem to be some significant performance improvements coming from Intel (just to be clear I don't actually care either way about Intel and AMD, I like the competition and just want bang for buck, currently AMD seems the processor group of choice) and so was considering waiting to see what happens with those processors.
I am not particualrly experimental with PC hardware (I don't mind a bit of overclocking but nothing drastic) and so, as someone who most definitely won't be an early adopter, I wonder if the wait for the release of something no one has yet really seen is actually worth it. Any views on that would be appreciated.
In the meantime I am looking for a decent spec, I really only want to upgrade memory/graphics cards and that sort of thing over the next 2-3 years. I would prefer a CPU 'out of the box' that I don't have to overclock unless I want to (which probably takes out Opterons, though it depends how 'easy' it is to overclock them on air with a decent cooler). I don't need a new monitor, keyboard nor mouse as yet, so the budget for the case and everything in it is £1400 including win xp sp2.
I am slightly concerned about dual cores as I keep reading about having to run them through the single core in some games (not sure if this slows things down) - certainly they seem to be of the future but not very now.
If you guys could offer a spec that would be appreciated and give me a good idea about whether to wait or if what can be had now would keep me happy.
Purpose of the PC is working from home (which lets face it I could practically do on a 486 if it would run MS Bloatware, so most things will handle that) and then of course gaming (ranging from fps to rpgs etc). I'd like to, for a short while until everything in my shiny new machine goes out of date (after 2 weeks heh), be able to run the newer things at a good rate and really see the benefit of a fairly costly upgrade. Ideally I'd prefer Nvidia graphics because I have had horrible Ati driver issues in the past (admittedly a long time ago), but I am open to all suggestions.
Apologies for long post, advice and help appreciated.
and with it being dual core, as you said, increased future proofing.