OT: Hardware opinions sought

[Dan]

Anne Wilson wrote:
[snip]
> I know that PCI Express was tipped to be something to watch, but 
> that was a good while ago.  Since I haven't seen much mention of it recently 
> I wondered if it was another thing that hadn't lived up to the promise. 
On the contrary, PCI Express is a very real standard. If you look at any 
high-performance graphics cards, they _are_ PCI-express (barring the odd 
release of the AGP 7800GS), and the "newer" AMD athlon 64s are socket 
939, which means it goes in PCI-express supporting motherboards. The new 
line of AMD chips coming out later this year are only going to have one 
socket, for PCI-express motherboards; socket 754 will still be around 
for AGP motherboards, but I have a feeling they're going to start to 
dwindle in numbers when the new CPUs are for PCI-express and only old 
ones support AGP. I don't know as much about the new Intel line but I 
imagine a similar situation.
[snip]
All in all, the question is whether you are willing to get a new 
motherboard and CPU to support the new slot; if you are, I would suggest 
waiting until Intel and AMD both release new sockets later this year; 
AMD's new chips _may_ fit in old socket 939 or perhaps 940 boards, but 
Intel's definitely won't fit in socket 775 or anything that is currently 
out. I'm definitely not upgrading my CPU or memory until the new lines 
come out, when I might eventually get a new motherboard/CPU/memory all 
at once.
-Dan