We've now had about 6 months of the AMD Phenom and Barcelona cores. AMD has had a few problems with these, including ramp issues, a TLB erratum, and a general performance lag behing the 65nm Intel quad cores. However, at the low-to-midrange, the AMD platforms and CPUs are still tough to beat for price/performance.
Speaking of price to performance, the new AMD 780G chipset is looking like a solid win for AMD. They have integrated a mid-range Radeon grpahics controller into the northbridge, while at the same time, significantly lowered power draw with the chipset. To cap it off, the rest of the features on the board are very solid. We are seeing smooth HD playback with this chipset, which until this point, has been unheard of for on-board video. Hybrid Crossfire caps it off, which allows adding a cheap secondard Radeon to work in tandem with the onboard video controller for improved 3D horsepower.
Memory pricing continues to stay low. I have been encouraging customers to go with 8G of RAM and a 64-bit OS, if possible, as the RAM is so cheap.
For an overclocked system, I now recommend an Intel Core 2 Quad platform. We should see 45nm Yorkfield quad cores soon. For now, AMD cannot match the raw performance. Further, there's no reason to go with DDR3 memory yet, as DDR2 is almost as fast and WAY cheaper. So, I continue to recommend P35 chipset boards. Using a P35 board with DDR2 memory is half as cheap as the P38 boards with DDR3 memory, and will get you to within 5%-performance wise. When DDR3 memory comes down, then I will start recommending the newer platform.
For a value system, AMD is really the way to go now, especially with the 780G chipset and great onboard video. AMD socket AM2+ triple-core Phenom processors in the B3 stepping should arrive in the next month which will create the perfect budget system. It will be a perfect storm of performance per dollar!
In the meantime, we have a custom quad-core Phenom system linked off the front page based on this same 780G chipset for $999. Its the most performance we can build right now for less than $1k.
For drives, you go one of two ways these days: If you can afford it, you use the WD Raptor 150G 10k RPM for the OS and apps. If not, you use a Seagate 500G 32M cache SATA-II (3.0G/s). If you do have the money, you use the WD Raptor 150G for OS and apps, and then use a 1TB Hitachi for data, or several of them in RAID-1 mirror for protection.
