I recently ordered new parts and I'll have them in on tuesday. I chose the AMD Phenom II 955 Black Edition, should be more than adequate and it should overclock to 3.8Ghz with good stability. I also bought a new case, an Antec Three Hundred. Should be less bulky than my old Antec server chassis. My old PSU will not suffice because it doesn't even have SLI power connectors, so I bought a 650W Antec. I bought one 250GB SATA hard drive, with intentions of buying two or three more for the purpose of raid0. For ram, I have ordered 4GB's of DDR3 PC12800, also with intentions of buying another set in the future. My brother dashed me his old 8800GTX, which should be adequate, and possibly more so when I buy a second for SLI. I think this system will be pretty potent, especially considering that I only spent $600. I am hoping this setup is somewhat future proof with the AM3 socket and DDR3 ram, time will tell. I am giving Windows 7 a shot, with a dual boot of XP. I read a few reviews of my MSI motherboard having burn-in failures, wish me luck so I don't get a bad one.
The 955 runs great at 3.8Ghz, my co-worker has his running fine at that speed. Make sure you run WPrime burn in a couple times on the 1024 file size. Don't bother dual booting with XP, just go right to Win7. Everything can be made to run in 7. I started out dual booting and then ended up scrapping it because I never used XP again.
I havent had a problem with vista in quite a while, I am not running nearly as potent of as system as you boys are, but none the less...
I'm running an AMD Phenom II X4 810 in my new machine and I haven't found anything that can out run it. New build replaced my old P4 3.0 / 2 gig machine and it makes the old one seem like an old tired Pinto in a race with a new Vette. I'm running XP because Vista sucked so hard but I have an order in for 7.
For the great price of the phenomII's nothing can touch their price/performance. At least until the i7 comes down more in price. They still slaughter AMD.
I had a large multi-pack of OEM XP discs and COAs that we bought for a group of PCs built for our office staff. There is always something quicker out there... just around the corner. Nothing out there (that I need) that the Phenom II can't handle well at this point. I'm not a gamer so all I have been really concerned with was video and photo editing power. Hi Res 300+ dpi full page Photoshop images just scream on this machine. That's all I need.
