Replacement for Praetorian / AMD 64

[kep55]

I built my first PC a few years ago. The specs are / were:
AMD Athlon 64+ 2.0GHz
Gigabyte K8NS-Pro mobo
ATI Radeon 9550 graphics
1 GB RAM (It did have 3 but two of the slots died for some reason)
NEC 1100A DVD-RW
Samsung DVD-RW SATA
Samsung 250GB SATA
WD 160GB ATA
Maxtor 160 GB ATA
NEC floppy
ANTEC 450 W PSU
CoolerMaster Praetorian Case

The main reason I got the Praetorian case is because it has a slide out mobo tray. Plus being brushed aluminum. As you can see, I'm not into gaming. If I want to fry my brain I'll watch the US Presidential campaign.
A friend strongly suggests jumping to an Intel Core 2 while I'm still partial to AMD. Any serious suggestions for a new build? I'd like to reuse the drives.

 

[Nik_I]

if you wanna stick with amd, the phenom isn't such a bad idea. sure it's not as fast as the core 2's but it's still not all that bad of a cpu. along with a 790GX motherboard and a radeon 4850, you've got a kickass system going there