I have not heard a whole ton on the overclockablity of the new AM2 based CPU's but if they are anything close to the Venice core 939 then they also overclock very well. 2.7 on air so ive heard.
Personally unless you have to, I am not going to even think about any new platform changes for the next year or so.
Yeah Conroe is great and all, but its the first chip of many to come.....From both Intel and AMD.....And knowing intel, every new chip they make is going to require a new chipset (i.e. motherboard) Although AMD isnt much better now a days. I think as many said AM2 was a easy way to jump into the DDR-II game. Other than that I am pretty certain that the next big thing from AMD is not going to be socket AM2 based.
Technically I am not getting into the DDR-II race until it becomes a standard and there is a significant performance increase over standard DDR with reasonably priced memory.
I have a AM2 X2 4400+ sitting on e-bay right now because If i used it I would have to upgrade my mobo and my memory wich i do not want to do.
And we are talking about quad-core ? I know and have researched this myself, but isnt that a little much ? We havnt even begun to get a software base for double threaded applications yet let alone quad threaded. Dual core is nice because yes, you can enode a DVD while burning one. But how much faster do you think quad core is going to be ?
In theory you can burn a DVD, encode a movie, play a game and scan for virus's all at the same time, but dont you think that Memory is going to be the bottleneck when it comes to doing that many things at one time ?
Even with the bandwidth of DDR-II 1066mhz your going to notice lots of lagg when trying to do 4 things at once. Do you not agree ? I notice that with dual core. Yeah I can encode a movie and play F.E.A.R but do my frame rates drop ? And does the encoding take a little longer ? Yes it does, because it is allocating memory to each task in return making less avaliable for each task.
So I guess I would have to say my advice is to get the cheepest platform that you can survive with for the next year or so. Almost any P4 or AM2 single core will be pretty cheap. Unlike me, if your buying a new system go with a DDR-II chasis. I myself have $300 stuck into DDR so the jump to DDR-II at this time wouldnt be very cost effective for a few extra FPS in games.
Sorry im throwing a ton of ways to look at things out there but it is a confusing time in terms of system configurations.
Another thought is chipsets, of course Intel is going to make their own for ever, making it a necessity to buy a new motherboard every time a new CPU comes out. But AMD is not going to have Nvidia as a backer for too much longer either. AMD's buy out of ATI is a certainty of that.
