[Nightowl225]

This is my first post.

Come February I will be upgrading from a socket 478 ASUS P4P800SE, which doesn't have no upgrade life anymore for AGP videocards, socket 478 cpus, and can only run socket 479 cpu's if I get the adapter from ASUS. Only thing I can truly upgrade at this point and time is the memory.

Here's what I decided on for my upgrade

ASUS P5LD2 Deluxe motherboard
Intel Pentium D 830 - 3GHZ cpu
2GB kit of Crucial DDR2 533 or DDR2 667 memory
Thermaltake Silent 775 cpu cooler
Antec TruePower 2.0 550watt ATX 2.0 powersupply
Waiting on Sapphire Radeon X1600XT videocards to come out which hopefully should be out pretty soon, as I plan on possibly getting 1 or 2 to with the idea of setting up a dual videocard system either right away or sometime down the line.

[daedal]

Well, depending on what you use your PC for, here are my recommendations/critics:

Is you tend to game more than use applications, I'd suggest you jump ship to AMD. You could pick up a S939 X2-3800+ or X2-4000+ in the same price range as the Pentium D830. If you want to go dual-video (Crossfire?), you're better off spending the extra dough on a single X1800XT rather than two X1600XT. You'll get much better performance.

Hope this helps you a bit.

[H3X4D3C1M4L]

I'd say jump ship to AMD anyway....the X2 blows the Pentium D's out of the water.

[Lowfat]

February is a long ways away, I wouldn't plan anything now, as new tech will be out including Intel's 65nm CPUS. The Cedar Mill, Presler (dual core with 4MB of L2 cache), as well as Yonah's. And motherboards with the 975X chipsets (which support SLI as well as crossfire i think) will be available.

BTW Pentium M's rule I love mine with a passion, you can usually find the cpu's on ebay for dirt cheap, and the CT-479 Socket479 adapter can be bought for less than $50.