nas,
I am not hurting badly with my current setup, which means I can upgrade at a leisurly pace.
It looks like the Socket 939 chips is THE upgrade a lot of people are waiting for. While Socket 754 chips look great compared to competition, and so does FX (well not exactly FX, but for example, Opteron 146 - 2 GHz is $299 and dual channel), but I have a lot of hope for Socket 939, including support for faster memory (as Paul Flynn just linked).
By then (May, June) we should have some idea about performance of the newest graphics chips, if they are worth the money (heat and noise).
On the subject of computers, and video cards, I seem to recall that when nVidia came out with their lawnmower edition card, there was some talk of the card being able to lower the clock speed when not in demanding 3D mode. Is this a common feature in all their cards now?
The reason I ask is that I built this Shuttle XPC computer with Athlon64, nVidia 5200 based card (fanless), and the machine is running very hot. I have Cool'N'Quiet enabled (on other computers with conventional cases and big heatsink, it runs fanless), so it must be graphics card that is contributing to the heat.
I haven't spent much time experimenting with it, but I am going to look if the feature of slowing the card down works in the card I have.
Anyway, this (ability of graphics card to work quietly) will be one of the criteria for my computer. AMD has solved this problem on the CPU side, and it would be a shame to lose this gain with a noisy graphics card. I would not mind if the card generates more noise while displaying demanding 3D images, but I don't want any noise when typing message like this.
Joe
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