I've been looking at the various choices available to me as far as upgrades go. If you have a look at my current system (on the left hand side of this posting there should be a little my system link) then it looks like it was built on the extreme cheap, thats because it was built on the extreme cheap last year when my old computer was taken out by a power surge. Now that i've had time to get some cash together and look at my options I have some up with the following possibilities for a complete overhaul, all prices are from Scan (I did spec a s939 system too, but the price turned out virtually identical to the AM2 system):
AMD Athlon X2 AM2 system
AMD AM2 Athlon 64 3800 + Windsor Core, Dual Core 2GHz, 512KB x 2 Cache, Retail £104.56
Arctic Cooling Freezer 64 Pro - S754/939/940 £13.50
2Gb (2X1Gb) Corsair TwinX XMS2, DDR2 PC6400 (800), 240 Pin, Non-ECC Unbuffered, CAS 5-5-5-12 £145.28
MSI AM2 K9N NEO-F NF550, Socket AM2, PCI-E (x16), DDR2 800, SATA II, SATA RAID, ATX £49.97
256Mb Leadtek 7900GT, PCI-E (x16), Standard, Mem 1320 MHz, GPU 450 MHz, 24 Pipes, Dual DVI-I/HDTV £184.48
Xclio 3010B Black Midi Tower Case w/o PSU Hi End AMD64/Prescott Ready £25.79
Total: £523.58
Intel Core 2 Duo system
Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 S775, 1.86Ghz, 1066Mhz FSB, Conroe Core, 2M Cache OEM (w/o Heat Sink Fan) £135.07
Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro - P4 up to 4.4GHz - S775 Dual Core Ready £15.08
2Gb (2X1Gb) Corsair TwinX XMS2, DDR2 PC6400 (800), 240 Pin, Non-ECC Unbuffered, CAS 5-5-5-12 £145.28
Gigabyte GA 965P-DS3, Intel P965, S775, PCI-E (x16), DDR2 533/667/800, SATA II, ATX £98.69
256Mb Leadtek 7900GT, PCI-E (x16), Standard, Mem 1320 MHz, GPU 450 MHz, 24 Pipes, Dual DVI-I/HDTV £184.48
Xclio 3010B Black Midi Tower Case w/o PSU Hi End AMD64/Prescott Ready £25.79
Total: £604.39
Now the question is this: Is the Core 2 system worth the extra £80, considering that i'm looking at overclocking the thing too?