BEST rig to buy today that will still be good tomorrow...

[Tbag]

That was my solution in December:

Intel Core2 Quad Q6600, 4x 2.40GHz S775
Gigabyte GA-P35-DS4 P35 Rev.2.0
4096MB DDR2RAM
512MB 8600GT SilentFX
500GB 3,5" Samsung

In December this Rig was around 900 Euro. All I need to do when SOW comes out is to replace the graphics card. And probably a new OS to finally use the 4GB of RAM.

[Kira]

Originally Posted by Tbag

That was my solution in December:

Intel Core2 Quad Q6600, 4x 2.40GHz S775
Gigabyte GA-P35-DS4 P35 Rev.2.0
4096MB DDR2RAM
512MB 8600GT SilentFX
500GB 3,5" Samsung

In December this Rig was around 900 Euro. All I need to do when SOW comes out is to replace the graphics card. And probably a new OS to finally use the 4GB of RAM.

Good idea. As graphics cards are the fastest to get old in a system, it's better to buy a cheap one which is still able to easily run IL2 on max. Then you get a real good graphics card when BoB comes out.

[F19_Klunk]

quote from lacrits @ simhq

Yesterday Intel officially announced their new mainstream chipset "P45" yesterday. This chip will be replacing the current "P35". New features are a 45nm [edit note: 65 nm] architecture meaning smaller component and lower heat dissipation, PCI-E ver. 2.0, higher bus speeds (1600Mhz) and a new south bridge (ICH10). Performance wize it's very close to the high-end X48 but with not so many PCI-E lanes. New motherboards with P45 should be starting to hit the market within days, both with DDR2 and DDR3 RAM support.
This should mean that Intel chip X38 and P35 board pricing should take a drop and become more affordable as they are no longer "the latest and greatest"..

On the graphics side both ATI and nVidia are releasing new series of GPU's. ATI is focusing on the mainstream market with their Radeon 4800 while nVidia are looking to improve performance even more with GTX200.. These new graphics cards will be release in around 2 weeks (17 June). Expect ATI's boards to be decent performers with attractive pricing while nVidias new ones will be expensive hot and power hungry monster performers.
I hope and expect this to positively impact the price of todays nVidia 9800- and 8800- series cards as well as ATI 38-series cards.

Intel will also be releasing new Core 2 Duo and Core Quad CPU's during third quarter year. A new top performer E8600 (3,33Ghz) and new revisions of existing E8xxx CPU's are maybe the more intresting for the mainstream market. Price reductions of existing will also follow with the new CPU models.

So those of you that have been holding off buying new gear can start looking again at the online retailers for pricing in a few weeks time. The stuff you kept from buying because it was a bit pricy during spring I predict will now be much more affordable during the summer and autumn!