New Rig Soon... but When??

Ok, im doing about as much as i can with the old AGP bassed rig.
The hardware for the most part is mostly around 2 years old and its time i got a new tower... so sometime this summer i plan on buiding a new rig ground up.

It will use 2gb of ram regardless, and a single realy awsome graphics card (think x1900xt 512 or better), but...
My biggest unknown in this build is processor choice, do I:

A) go for the ~$300ish opty (165-170 i think) now? and use DDR ram with tight timings that can be had for dirt cheap?
B) wait for the Conroe with the E6600 also in the $300 ballpark, and hope that ddr2 has affordable ram with tight memory timings by that time?

Anyway which of those options offers a better preformance to price ratio for the ram and proc??

conroe is around the corner so I would wait until then how prices and performance really are.
Prices for AMD rigs should drop as well by that time.

Since your building a new rig from scratch maybe DDR2 is the better option for future upgrades. (as long as DDR3 doesnt appear suddenly)

Hmm, but the "I want it NOW" realy starts to do its thing after a while... Despite not being able to play EQ2 at max settings with my current rig, i suppose i can wait on the upgrade untill vanguard releases.

Personaly i was never that excited about DDR2 because in my expierence, having that much more clockspeed didnt mean squat if the timings sucked. Oh and if they do come out with DDR3, memory makers can go **** themselves

I'm in the same boat, except that I already own a opty 165. I had planned to build the system months ago, but had been waiting on my sister to save up some money (I was going to sell her the rig I am going to replace.)

Fast forward oh 6-7 months now. It turns out that she still isn't going to be ready for a while, in the meantime I've been sitting on the 165 and now Conroe is right around the corner. At this point I'm wondering if I should just wait a few more months (since I've already waited so long,) try to sell the opty on Ebay and then just get a Conroe when they come out

Chaos_Being: You have the processor, you might as well build now. If you don't

Sleepy_Steve: Why not try building for the future ? Intel platform with DDR2 and PCI-Ex Video Card will be compatiblew with Conroe - if you hold off on the buy for ashort while longer then motherboards that are 'conroe compatible' should start appearing.

Newb Question: Whats the socket size for Conroe ? Is it going to use the same LGA775 socket ?

Arthalen said:

Newb Question: Whats the socket size for Conroe ? Is it going to use the same LGA775 socket ?

Click to expand...

yes, its the same socket.. thought the powermanagement and voltage reulation chip in the current mobo's are not compatalbe, other then the Intel badaxe rev.304 and it's not the best overclocker in the world. And getting that rev. right now is a matter of all the rev. 302&303's selling out before they start selling these (so there's a good chance that you could get an ASUS that will take your chip further before you could actually buy the right revision of the Intel)

also take into consideration the retail chips wont be here for a few months (July)

Chaos_Being: You have the processor, you might as well build now. If you don't

Click to expand...

Here's the kicker though: I'm waiting for my tax returns first to build the new pc. Who knows when those will get here. Which of course, forces me to wait and makes my build time closer to the Conroe release.

Of course, a overclocked 165 with a 7900gtx or 1900xtx is pretty much going to run everything I want, but its hard to not want the fastest stuff possible

Chaos_Being... how much of a discount would you think about selling that opty for? - reply in PM
I only ask as we live in the same state and shipping would be fast / cheap.

Personaly im leaning towards that opty because its matured, and still has a good bit of life left in it. Where as conroe looks to be 3-4 months before the cips are out, and likley another month or two after that before there is a decent variety of boards out that support the thing.

As it turns out I already recieved the larger portion of my refund (direct deposit,) so I may end up just using the opty for my build now. This will also let my convert my current pc to another media pc earlier, which would be a good thing because my wife wants a media pc on the tv upstairs again

Of course I would still love to have a conroe system, but I'm so tired of waiting