time to upgrade, cpu and vid card suggestions

[busetibi]

currently running an athlon xp 3000+ and a GeForce 6800GT,
(i dont want to get into a shit fight about AMD vs Intel, ive always used athlons and im happy with them) been about 3 or more years since my last upgrade, its about time to spend some cash, not bothered about cost.
need a new cpu and vid card, anything new about to come out (say in the next month or so) or is the hardware selling now up to scratch,i use this machine solely for games and fucking around the net.
suggestions please

[obsidian]

Not intended to be an AMD vs. Intel comment (I've owned both, have been happy with both) but if you are buying a new computer at this moment, Intel's Core2Duos have the upper hand, bar none.

You could wait for the AMD's version of the Quad, but don't hold your breath, they still need to fix some of the major bugs which is making the chip extremely unstable.

Video card, check out the nVidia 8800 series, pick a flavour depending on how much cash you want to blow on it. That's currently the top end king.

I'm not sure if there's anything coming out around the corner, you'll have to do some research. But you know computers, no sense in waiting for the next best thing. I believe the nVidia 9800's are slated for release soon and it's supposed to own. That might be worth waiting for if you're rich, or pick up the 8800 hopefully with a price drop.

[busetibi]

thank you sir,

[Dr_Watson]

all the cool kids are buying Q6600's and overclocking the pants off them.

[MaCaBr3]

Intel C2D processor do have the upperhand when it comes to performance with a small drawback that it's expensiver than the AMDs.

I'm gonna upgrade too and it will probably be an intel E6750 which kinda fits in my budget, then i'm gonna overlock it some more . I already bought a 8800GTS which is more than enough for what I need. One of the reason that I'm gonna upgrade is that my current AMD 3000+ is a huge bottleneck of the latest GPU's. The faster your CPU the better your GPU will perform.

The 8800 GTX is only recommend if you gonna ply on high resolution (1900 and higher) If you have an LCD screen with max resolution of 1600x1050 the GTS version is more than enough.

Minimum RAM recommendation is 2gig or higher for the latest games and Vista.

[Grudge]

Agreed, unless I was building a HTPC I would go for Intel now.

Thing is though, for gaming you don't really need anything faster than a E6600, unless you also have SLI'd 8800GTX's to fee and run at 1900x1200. So that extra $100 is better spent on the graphics card than the CPU.

[obsidian]

Or just save up some extra cash for the Q6600 and a second 8800GTX?

(thanks DooMer for fixing the drool emoticon)