New gaming PC in 3-9 months. what to wait for?

[lasseht]

Knowing that I will hopefully get a bonus in June/July I'm looking to buy or as I did before make up my own PC. Rather than upgrade my current PC I'm looking to get all new and pass the old one my PC to my son (only 4 years old, so pac-man and lego racers it will do np) not that his AMD XP2400 is having a problem.

I'm rather use to play games in max details and in the 1280x1024 res that fits my 19" TFT. With games like BF2 I have had to put details down to medium. So the time for me to upgrade is most def. due.

However is an AMD X2 already a little old technology? When is quad core poping out of the wood work? What about the Nvidia 7800-7900 series, its been around for a while now...

2Gb, 4 or even 8 Gb RAM? everyone was looking stupidly at me 3 years ago when I put in 1Gb of RAM.

With Vista in Q1 07? and Direct X version 10 looming what's a man to do.

The new PC has to last me another 3 years, so I want to get it right.


Current PC spec, so you know where im comming from:

P4 - 3GHz
Asus p4p800 m/b
1Gb ram (2x512 400DDR)
6800 Ultra
SB Audigy platinum.

The only upgrade I did over the last 3 years was to upgrade the graphics card from an ATI 9800 and change the PSU to a Tagan 480 to power the damn thing (learned the hard way).

I could possible upgrade the PC in the short term to 2Gb ram, since i've read it should help with BF2 performance (might be worth it if I have to wait to Q1 07)..

Budget for new PC = £1500 ish (I plan to keep my 19" TFT).


Guys, Girls & Guru's

Your opinion's please

 

[RichPLS]

If you are buying now, an AMD Opteron 170 ($410) with an Asus A8R32-MVP ($180) would be the fastest yet reasonably priced upgrade, and you can reuse your other components for till you decide to upgrade others parts.

 

[JackRyan]

I was thinking about building a new system around an Asus P5LD2, a Pentium D 930 and a 7900GT.... but I'm also looking forward to Intels Conroe in Q3, might get exciting. But I won't be able to to jump in immediately with initial prices being what they usually are, so for now I'm just upgrading my AMD 3200+/Asus A8N-E from an FX5900 to a 7900GTco and maybe replace the 2x512MB OCZ DDR RAM with some fast 2x1GB. If I need more horsepower I'll also get an X2 3800+ or so, depending on how prices develop in the near future.

Judging by the availability of the 7600/7900 it won't be obsolete in 3 months time, although NVidias G8x is expected for the second half of 2006

 

[RichPLS]

Well then, I would go with this Asus board and a cheap 820/920 CPU now, and add a Conroe at launch for $530. The best board supporting Conroe now it seems.
I suspect pricing might be 10% higher at launch first few weeks, but when supplies ramp within a month, they will stablize at this price and stay there for over 6+ months.

 

[JackRyan]

I don't think so, that would mean MB+CPU+RAM+VGA = $1190 (£683) in the cheapest store over here. Futhermore I'm quite sure there will be better (or cheaper while adequate) boards for the Conroe in Q3/Q4, and finally I don't want a crossfire board. If I HAD to I'd choose SLI, but I don't even want that right now
You see, I'm an Intel/NVidia fanboy (excluding the nForce4) because I take stability over speed any day Comes with the job I guess . The AMD System I mentioned is the very first AMD system I built... ever. And while it's quite fast I was promptly disappointed by the nForces instability and shortcomings (Raise your hands if you bought an nForce4 board partially because you thought the HW-Firewall would be cool and take some load of the CPU).

As of now I ordered an eVGA 7900GT CO for $430 (£247), and nothing more yet, and I'll upgrade the AMD box because it has a PCIe. Could get a 7800GS for the AGP in my P4 2.6 on a P4C800E-Deluxe that's also still running well, but that would really be a deadend :?

If I upgrade MB+CPU+RAM in Q4 (or whenever the Conroes get closer to $400, allthogether it should cost me < $900.) it's not such a big deal because I always have use for this slightly-old-systems for wife and kid or to upgrade a streaming server or such.

EDIT: OK, the Conroe E6600 2.40GHz @ $316 will probably attract me most

 

[gpfear]

Wait to get some benchmarks on these new platforms: Conroe, AM2. Then start pricing out the components you need. If the software cant benefit from the new hardware offerings there is no reason to upgrade.

 

[pat]

If you are buying now, an AMD Opteron 170 ($410) with an Asus A8R32-MVP ($180) would be the fastest yet reasonably priced upgrade, and you can reuse your other components for till you decide to upgrade others parts.

He'll need a new PCI-e video card as well. But if buying now, that's the best he could get, and that will make it last way over the first implementation of Conroe.