Worth upgrading right now?

[StrongBadia]

I currently have:

PD 930 @ 4ghz
4GB Crucial Ballistix Tracers PC6400 4-4-4-12
975xbx
8600 GT
250GB WD SATA
Antec TruPower 550

I just bought a stacker 830.

I am going to be putting about $600 into my rig in January. Would it be worth the money to go X38/Q6600 right now? Or would I be better off putting two 3870's in CF? My main concern is that my Pentium D will severly bottleneck such a setup, even at 1900x1080 which is my native res.

What should I do?

 

[BillParrish]

I think you should drop a cheap C2D in your current board and OC the crap out of it and save your money for Nehalem next year because it will make everything we have in the way of motherboards and CPUs obsolete. Do not want to comment on the video as I have not paid attention to comparisions of 2 Xfire 3870's vs an 8800GT.

http://processormatch.intel.com/COMPDB/SearchResult.aspx?Boardname=d975xbx

Perhaps there is some reason you cannot run a C2D ? If there is not, your motherboard is fine and I would not spend $300 for 10% (maybe) performance improvement in a motherboard, the bang for the buck is in going to a C2D OCed.

What software do you run now or in the next year that would take advantage of a quad core ? A quad might help with the resale of the board and cpu later but unless there is a lot you are not saying an E6550 OCed to 3.2GHz would do the trick until the "next big thing - Nehalem". Then drop a load of cash as you are hopefully assured of at least 2 years before your stuff becomes obsolete, again.

My 3 1/2 cents. (This assumes Intel does not delay Nehalem launch so it can soak us some more with a late X48 launch).

 

[StrongBadia]

my XBX is the revision that doesn't support C2D without soldering resistors to the pcb. I do a lot of media encoding and use CPU intensive apps like winrar and newsleecher (all on the up and up of course ), so I think a quad core might be worth it.

 

[DemonDiablo]

my XBX is the revision that doesn't support C2D without soldering resistors to the pcb. I do a lot of media encoding and use CPU intensive apps like winrar and newsleecher (all on the up and up of course ), so I think a quad core might be worth it.

With that being sad I'd go the Quadcore route. Go as cheap as possible on the motherboard, I think a ds3 will do?, so that maybe you can get a next generation video card down the road which would more than likely make a CF setup look pointless, espically since you seem to be budget minded. So maybe you can find a setup that will allow you to save a hundred or so dollars, sell the 8800GT for a pretty penny when the next generation of video cards comes out, and come out on top in the end.