Buy New Setup Now or....

[Randell Floyd]

I have managed to save some money for a computer upgrade, and due to some shares falling my way I now have that money six months early.

I was going to wait for A64 x2 to fall down to a reasonable price before going down that route. But having seen what the new Venice cores are able to do for only a £100 chip it's now crossed my mind that I should possibly think about getting the new setup now, and then in six months or whatever look again at just purchasing a new CPU not the whole setup.

So on a £1500 budget would you buy now, or is there any new tech in mobos, gfx etc worth waiting that extra six months for?


Current setup is:

Shuttle SN85G4v2
Socket 754 A64 3000+ ( 130, Newcastle )
2 x 512mb OCZ PC3200
Leadtek 6800nu

Not looking at watercooling, but a silent(ish) overclocking system.

Most of the work I do on the computer is, Video Editing, Photography Editing, Gaming ( summer of BF2 ), DVD Encoding, and just d/l and surfing.

[StormPC]

If you don't need to upgrade then wait. Things always get cheaper with time. If you do need a new system then waiting is silly. You can't predict the future. Buy what you need or want.

You have a fine system right now so I doubt you NEED an upgrade. If you are waiting for X2's to get reasonable you better be willing to wait at least a year, probably longer. The demand on them is going to be huge for a very long time. Most of the people who buy them won't even use the extra core, and in most cases the singlecores will offer much more power for about half the price. If you don't run mulitple threads with at least 2 CPU intensive tasks dualcores are a complete waste.