New gaming rig?

Hey all, my 3 year old PC is about to run out of steam soon. It hasn't been a problem for a while because, tbh, nothing much of note has been released that I've wanted to play for a while. But what with the likes of Crysis and Bioshock looming in the next 2 months, Vista hopefully bedding in/being sorted, and a drop in prices of some of the DX10 GPUs I was beginning to think of getting a new rig. The old one is as follows:

AMD Athlon 64 3500+
ASUS something or other Mobo
1GB PC3200 RAM
nVidia GF6800GT
150GB HD (can't remember the speed)
Assorted bits and bobs, DVD etc etc.

When I got this AMD was the top of the gaming tree, as was nVidia. But I've been completely out of the loop for a while and was wondering if people could give any suggestions on who's top dog now (I've heard good things about the Intel Dual Core E660 or something like that?). Also, is now/soon the wrong time to buy 'cos a new generation of chips/cards are on the horizon?

Spent approx £1300 last time, looking at a similar, or slightly cheaper, amount this time. No need for bleeding edge, can't afford the extra premium cost but top of the mid-range/bottom of the top end when the major price drop occurs would be good. Also gonna build it myself this time so that should save a bit.

Cheers in advance!

I'm three or four months out of touch but I was speccing a system up until recently (when I bought the bike instead).

Some comments\observations

I belive Intel Core Duo (dual core) are the dogs danglies at the moment and except on budget systems offer better bang per buck than AMD (and possibly outright performance too). The mainstream offerings were E6300, E6400, E6600 & E6700. These have been slightly tweaked so I think they are E6320 etc now with a change in cache size but same family. Kinda how much you want to spend really.

Mobo - well that depends on what chip and graphics you decide to go for. I'm an ASUS fan so good brand to stick with.

RAM - It's all DDR2 these days and 2Gb is where it's at. 2x1Gb kits can be had from £120 up to silly money.

Graphics - This has changed in the last few months but then the breaking technology was DX10 support with GFX cards moving from pixel and vertex shaders over to stream processors which can be instructed to do either job. DX10 is only supported in Vista and there's precious little games out there using it but if you plan to keep this one for 3 years then given that the prices on this stuff have crashed I see no reason not to get something that supports it. The architecture sounds more efficient too. The card that first sported DX10 was Nvidia's GTX8800, with cheaper GTS and half memory GTS offerings following. I think ATi must have their DX10 card out these days and I'm not sure how the two offerings match up.

HDD - So cheap these days hardly worth worring about.

DVD - If ya got one already why worry, if you're keeping that rig in one piece then you can pick up a decent Dual Layer jobbie up for £20 (Pioneer being my preference).

HSF - Arctic cooling are CPC's favourite - cheap yet effective.

My spec was all about bang for buck but with DX10 support and buying everything needed so I could keep the old rig in one piece. I had it at about £700 for E6400, Asus P5B Deluxe mobo, ECS N8800GTS-320MX, Crucial CT2KIT (2x1Gb DDR2), JeanTEch Phong II case (cheap) and Antec Neo HE500 PSU. I didn't buy cos as I said the money got spent buying the SV

I reckon a grand would allow you to bump a few bits up and have a kick ass system. More than that and I think you'll be in diminishing returns territory.

Things will have moved on even in these few months. The above didn't include an HDD (got two lying around) but with price drops you'd get one in with the above for the same money now.

Custom PC Magazine isn't perfect but I find it a quite a good place to pick up info on where PC tech is at.

Good luck, enjoy and let us know what you plump for.

[northwind]

Core 2 Duos also overclock like mad, generally speaking, which is nice- you can get ridiculous speeds on air, in fact, for most people watercooling's become a bit superflous with the quality of big air coolers and cooler processors. Most 775 boards will have good clocking options too, so it'd be rude not to really. Arctic Cooler are fine, but a Tuniq Tower 120 or Titan Vanessa-L, among others, really outclass them- cooler and quieter, and not drastically more expensive.

But graphics cards... I'm on the fence. So far DX10's rubbish, there's about 3 games out there that use it and they're all rubbish to date, and the drivers aren't up to scratch so even the most powerful cards in the world give you jerkyvision. The 8xxx cards other than the 8800s aren't very good, they might do DX10 but they're less good at DX9 than a good oldschool card... The ATI ones don't really measure up either. If it was me, I'd probably buy a last-gen, high power card, the prices are in freefall and the last lot of Radeons were top notch (though a bit noisy). In fact, I did, I got a 7950GT which is up to high detail for most games even with a 22" widescreen. Not all, though, some games will always want more. I'd get a big PSU that'll suppotr an 8800 though, it's sensible futureproofing that. Corsair's 620 or 640 (whatever it is) is ace, quiet and stable, made by Seasonic but cheaper and better.

If you get any ATI card with the standard cooler, you'll want to replace it, they sound like hoovers.

[SoulKiss]

I havent done the readin required - but the AMD Phenom is supposed to kick botty.

Quad Cores aparently

Might start looking to upgrade around Christmas when Vista *Might* be useable.

Mind you with a dual 7800GTX rig, and mostly just playing WoW @ 1,920 x 1,200 my current set-up is just fine