I need your opinion

[camelass]

I always find myself playing the waiting game and I think this waiting game is screwing me over in the long run. About 6 months ago I did a half assed upgrade from my P4 2.8b to my current setup (listed below) to hold me over until Nehalem came out later this year. It's not a bad setup but I wish it could to a little bit more.

1. I would like to game at 1900x1200 and get away from AGP for good
2. I would like at least 4gigs of ram
3. I would like windows vista 64bit

Heres what I'm running now.

E4500 @ stock
Asrock 4CoreDual-SATA2
2gb kingston DDR2 667
160gig IDE HD
120gig IDE HD
DVD-ROM IDE
DVD-Burner IDE
Creative Audigy Gamer sound card
Sapphire x1950pro AGP
Mushkin HP-550 Enhanced Power Supply (550w)

I guess my question is if you were in my situation would you get a decent motherboard to overclock the snot out of the E4500 and pair it up with the Geforce GTX 200 when its released. Then play the waiting game AGAIN until the prices come down on the Nehalem mainstream chips? Or just milk what I have a bit longer and quit complaining?

 

[tiraides]

Though a simple motherboard/video card upgrade would solve your immediate problems, I have a few questions to ask:

- How much total are you willing to spend on the upgrades?
- Which parts (besides the motherboard and video card) do you want to replace? Which parts do you want to keep?
- Do you really want to wait for Nehalem or do you want a good system that could last you a few years?
- Do you plan on overclocking or using water cooling?
- Which games/programs are you planning on using?

 

[jamsblast]

if you plan to oc the cpu, spend a little in a conroe1333-d667 or an wolfdale1333-d667 that allows you to run with pinmods(fsb and vmod). But you have to change your HDD to sata ones.

 

[camelass]

Though a simple motherboard/video card upgrade would solve your immediate problems, I have a few questions to ask:

- How much total are you willing to spend on the upgrades?
- Which parts (besides the motherboard and video card) do you want to replace? Which parts do you want to keep?
- Do you really want to wait for Nehalem or do you want a good system that could last you a few years?
- Do you plan on overclocking or using water cooling?
- Which games/programs are you planning on using?

1. Money isn't really an issue but if I decide to do any upgrades, any upgrades I do now I would like to port over as much as I can to the Nehalem based system whenever I decide to go that route.

2. I just bought myself a pair of WD6400AAKS's so other than those I dont think anything can be saved for the Nehalem based rig. I would like to replace Mobo/Video/PSU

3. I would like to spend money on new tech. Since the socket 775 is near EOL I really dont think there will be much of any upgrades to what current CPUs that are available now. IMO Nehalem is where to spend your money at. I would like to have the option where I can do a simple CPU/Video upgrade when needed at a later date.

4. I may do a modest overclock on air. No water cooling

5. I mainly like playing the current FPS games. Crysis, COD4, World in Conflict. I also do a lot of photoshop and video editing.

As I'm typing this I am beginning to answer my own questions. I could just milk what I have and wait until some hard numbers come out on Nehalem and make my decision from there.

 

[engiNURD]

Mainstream Nehalem won't be out until H1'09. If you can wait that long, then do so. Otherwise, if you just want better gaming performance, pickup a new ATI vidcard, since they scale better than NVIDIA cards (since your 16x PCI-E slot is only 4x speed).