Now, what's an effective Platform / gfx / cpu upgrade?

[tfboy]

OK, Still not bought anything

Well, after reading a few reviews and articles, I am tending more towards the AN8. I can now appreciate the cost of SLI for it to be seriously worthwhile is rather high and even then, you're not always guaranteed to be to benefit from it with every software title. So maybe if I were to spend £300+ for GPU, I'd be better off with an X850 or so...
No doubt it would be quieter too.

I really liked the idea of the MSI K8N with its onboard hardware soundblaster live 24 which seemed rather good. From experience, I've been dissappointed with the SNR of the 850 codec found on all NF4 boards (apart from the MSI). I guess if it's that critical, I had better just get an audigy or other PCI based sound card...

The next question is is it really worth waiting another month for a venice-cored AMD64 chip? I'm thinking of buying a cheapish winnie 3000+ and then upgrading in 6 months time once the CPU market has stabilised a bit. I guess the advantages of the venice over the winnie are still all speculative until we get some concrete benchmarks and overclocking tests... Any thoughts guys?

I'll make a decision some day. In fact, still trying to sort out some of those nice cheap(ish) dell 20 inch TFTs

edit: I'm not so sure about the AN8. I have an old printer which I still use and some serial devices that would be rendered useless

The MSI still fits the bill although it would be silly to spend an extra £30 for SLI functionality that I may not use...

[speedy_s]

Have a look yourself
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu...64-venice.html
As i keep pc's quite long (3-5 yrs) i will need as much as upgradeblity as possible esp for RAM, as ram effects a LOT of things and as in my current 3000+ newcastle i cannot and would not upgrade past 1GB as it will slow down the pc mem timings. So it is a personal thing.

[tfboy]

thanks for that link speedy_s

Hmm. Decisions, decisions.......