AMD or Intel...

[trekkie00]

putting the total upgrade cost at $650.

That's right about what I was coming out with while speccing it out, without a new heatsink. If I splurge on the motherboard for Phenom, I can get one for $400 - possibly as low as $335 if I get a board that only supports x16/x4 on its PCIe slots. Plus, I just heard about the next architecture, and it sounds like it's coming out on the AM3 socket, while Intel appears to release a brand new socket every revision (socket 1155 for Sandy Bridge?).

Thanks for your help, I should have looked farther into everything before posting this thread. Gonna go with the Phenom so that I can possibly keep future compatibility.

 

[patonb]

Youcan't say that the i5s only upgrade path will be the 870, then lookway into the future for a super cheap 980x. I can easily see much better chips for 1156, as it just came out, so it should quite soon have 6 core non-ht chips.

 

[Slaymate]

Youcan't say that the i5s only upgrade path will be the 870, then lookway into the future for a super cheap 980x. I can easily see much better chips for 1156, as it just came out, so it should quite soon have 6 core non-ht chips.

The LGA1156 is limited. It's not going to be able to provide a large enough bandwidth path to support 6 cores. They might release a few more i7 800 series with just minor speed boosts at best. The main purpose of the LGA1156 was for the slower i3 and i5 cpu's and Intel knows they'll sell a lot of them and the i7 800 series is a great upgrade from the i3.