Looking ahead to build a system next year..

Ok I'm done buying guitar stuff for now due to my PC being in need of some sort of update. I'm wanting to completely overhaul the system save for the DVD drive and hard drives and case since they still are good.

anyways, I'm planning my budget to have around $1500 to spend near May/June of next year and I'm wondering just how much are components going to change from now until then?

Will what's cutting edge now (dual core cpu's, 8800GTX cards, DDR2, etc) be must have hardware or does the forecast call for other components that totally crush today's current production stuff? Like.... I know that the ASUS Striker Extreme is supposedly the new most badass mobo you can get but will it be a has been in may?

And the corsair dominator ram.. will it still be the king of ram in 5 months? Any luck of it dropping below $600 for 2 gigs of the stuff?

I know quad core CPU's are the hot ticket right now and I'm hoping to be able to have one of those in the budget by next year and unless Nvidia comes out with something better than the 8800 or ATI pulls out some miracle to best them, will the 8800GTX still be the big bad GPU or will it be considered one of those "pretty decent" cards but not the best?

I've seen benchmarks of quad vs dual core cpu's and it seems that for the time being, the dual core intels are slightly outperforming the quad core and the real world app benchmarks really aren't that much different so I'm thinking I could probably just get away with a quick dual core like an X6800 if the prices come down some.

I guess what I'm ultimately getting at is what system do you think would be the best you could get for $1500 around may/june of next year?

If it's too early to tell at this point, that's cool but I've been so out of the hardware loop I'm clueless right now.

Technology typically has a shelf life of 6 months. Not to say what you buy now won't be worth squat six months from now, just that the retail market no longer has interest in it.

In other words...too early to tell.

Look up threads dated 6 months ago and ask yourself if what is being discussed is considered "outdated" to you. You will see what I mean.

yep I figured that would be the case.

I spec'd out a system minus the video card to right at $1500 and from what I've read, it's pretty stout.

EVGA 680i mobo
WD 74 gig raptor
corsair 620W PSU
patriot 2X1 gig pc2 8500
Intel conroe E6600
Zalman 9700LED

All that comes to right around $1400 ish and the EVGA 8800GTX + shipping knocks it up to right at $1,960.11.

I've saved the items to a doc file so I'll see what prices are doing towards the end of this month and into next month. Meanwhile, I'm starting to sell off stuff aroudn the house to get $$ together.

I guess my main reason for asking all this is whether I should just go ahead and bite the bullet and buy all this relatively soon or wait it out longer to see what's next and just keep saving up.

I tried this almost 2 years ago back when PCI-E and 939 was the hot ticket and I had JUST bought my AGP 6800 so i was going to wait and never got around to doing anything about it.

theres always going to be something better out there. My advice is if cash is limited I wouldn't get crazy fast RAM as it offers little performance increase and you can run RAM async with the 680i so your not limiting your CPU overclock.

Also what is your PSU? the 8800GTX is demanding...along with the E6600 compared to older p4 chips.

Just do some digging to see what ram actually works ok with the i680.
If you have six months.. I would think that ram will get cheaper between now and then.
this ram list is currently being maintained decently http://ramlist.ath.cx/ddr2/

PSU's are getting a overhall.. and the ATI RD600 chipset MIGHT overshadow the i680 (it is also rumored to be able to run memory acync) that with ATI R600 GFX cards, they should be here by ~March would be my guess, if not earlier. I hear tell ATI will be using more power from the 5V rail with the 12V rail to power there monsters, so if your intrested in that gear wait on the PSU.

BTW.. the badaxe and the early DH's (975X mobos), whatever C2D that was in your budget, and Gskills DDR2 800 HZ's was the hot hardware 6 months ago. only somewhat dated at this point.

In 6 months time you might be looking at AMD (hopefully by then they will have something out which can outmatch the C2D)

May/June of next year will be an interesting time. At that point the current high-end will be kind of close-ish to being replaced. Q3 will bring 45nm C2Ds (along with the 'bearlake' chipsets'), K8L, probably the refresh of DX10 GPUs from NV, certainly by then there should be some mid-range DX10 from ATi and NV'z mid-range DX10 will be out. At the same time it's really too far out to tell for sure, spec'ing a system now for 6 months in the future is probably meaningless although it's sitll fun The current items might actually see a good price drop if you can hold out long enough until vendors try to dump their inventory for the new stuffs.