I'll take a crack at this one. I'm currently running an amd64 4000+ with the usual 1gb of ram duel channel, a nvidia 6800 GT OC card and around 2 HD running around 300gb. Currently my entire rig is in agp...which is sad but when i rebuilt my comp about 8 months ago, i wanted my comp to be up and running asap. So i bought a agp mobo and throw in an old agp card so at least I had a comp for about a month before I upgraded to my 6800. I'm currently saving up to upgrade cause I wanna get to duel core processing and run sli. I know duel core is available now, but I've heard a lot from Maximum about support of duel core in vista which will be 10x better than xp (course xp never really was expecting to fully support duel to begin with so) Only thing else bothering me is memory. The amount of resources that vista is gonna take will force gamers to have at least 2gb of ram on hand. I'm havn't been wowed at all with the latest talk of ddr2. I truely don't understand the purpose of offering 400mhz+ ram when you havn't even come close to using it as it is. Its simular to the agp vs pci-x debate. we know pcx is gonna be the way of the future but benches proved that agp was getting simular reads in scores mainly cause ur  barely using the amount of bandwith agp is putting out...not to mention the dbl bandwith that pcx went overboard. Back to the topic at hand however, will not upgrade to vista until they get past the first couple builds. I wanna personally see the demand and performance difference before i throw down and give into the Bill Gates monopoly ownership of OS. Still it'll never replace my Suse 10 duel boot OS. Oh and 16 flipping gb for install is mad insane. What the hell do they have that requires vista to be 16gb. My thanks to Maximum Pc for keeping me in the loop on Vista and it's progress monthly

Socket AM2 was just released, if you have a decent socket 939 system an upgrade wont net you enough proformance to be of any value.  Im not too familar with intels offerings but if you have a 3ghz+ system with a 945 or better chipset upgradeing now would be a waste.  Conroe looks awsome but all the benchmarks were done under intel controlled situations, if the graphics cards war between nvidia and ati have shown us anything manufacture controlled benchmarks can be complete BS.

  I plan to let my newly purchased system get obsolete before I get any new hardware, my guess is I have a long while till that happens(2-4 years).  The new tech isnt going to happen overnight and some of it sounds good now but will suck when it hits the real world.  Being an early adopter will most likely be more costly than benificial at this point.  Wait a year or two for the technology to mature and the duds to fizzle to get the most bang for your buck.  Heck new AGP cards were released last month and socket A still refuses to die,

F3ar0n... pci-x(server) isnt the same as PCIe(consumer).... haha cant belive andy didnt flip out

It was late, I was out of it

F3ar0n, I just signed up for Maximum PC mag and have been waiting for the first issue to arrive but its looking like they will start me out in June rather than May... so I hadn't read any of their recent articles on Vista.  Cool to hear MS is adding some improved multiprocessor support.  From what I’ve read, they've completely rewritten the sound stack, network stack, UI, revamped the api (winfx), etc.  Vista doesn't look too terribly different at face value, but there is a lot going on that users can't see that is making a difference.

I'm actually not all that "cutting edge" as you can see from my PC's specs.  I really like being able to see a major difference in performance when I upgrade.  I wouldn't even have the Athlon xp 3000+ if I hadn't gotten into a really good deal on a friend's motherboard and ram that supported it.  Previously, i had been running the most excellent A7V333 and the not so excellent Athlon XP 1800+.

I guess I had this grandiose vision of doing this big bang upgrade replacing everything, starting off with 64bit-only Vista and new hardware that supported it, direct x 10 video card, hybrid hard drive, etc.

Its true that not a lot of apps are multi-threaded to take advantage of dual-cores yet.  But, being able to run more single-threaded apps simultaneously is definitely beneficial.  Not having to shut down a bunch of apps before playing oblivion would be nice for fear of them bogging down the cpu in the background.

to be honest, i've been eyeing the macs.  I wouldn't mind trying one out and now with the ability to install any other OS if I ever got sick of OS X.  My brother is a mac-head and we have weekly discussions about PC vs Mac.  We have gotten pretty civil about it within the last few years.  Mostly probably because both Windows and Mac OS have gotten better and neither suck as much as they used to.  

Now that OS X is out, mac-heads feel safe to be able to actually open up to some gripes they had about OS 9 that they wouldn't dare reveal previously.  Same with Windows junkies who defended Windows 98 until Windows 2000 and XP came out and they started opening up to their gripes with 98 as well.  I'm somewhere in between.  I use Windows because that is what I use.  I've played with Linux, Mac OS 7.x through 10, Beos, etc.  Of all of them, Beos was the only OS that really blew me away from the start.  It had its issues but damn was it fast and easy to use.

My brother loves Mac OS so much that I can't help but want to try it out just to see if I get the same impressions that he does.  The problem is, to try out OS X (legally) requires a rather major hardware purchase as well.  To get anything worth its salt and have some life past a few months to a year, you have to spend well over a grand.  So, only recently have I felt safe to be able to try out a mac and if I just can't "get used to" OS X, I stil would have a nice laptop or desktop that I can play with.

Oh well...

Beos was the only OS that really blew me away from the start. It had its issues but damn was it fast and easy to use.

I agree 100% with you. BeOS just blew my mind in it's abilities and performance running on the same crappy hardware that I had Windows 98 on at the time. I'd really like to revisit it at some point. It's too bad it's all but dead currently.

But I'm in the same boat as you. I'd like to upgrade, but I'm kind of tired of doing it piecemeal with my current setup. Just like OS X and Windows XP, it's time to cut the cord to the past and just start from from scratch. I will be waiting until next year to do so though. My current setup (Athlon XP 3200 [socket 754], 1GB Corsair Pro PC4000, 6800GT OC, way too many hard drives, etc.) is great for 90% of the stuff out there, but I am the bleeding edge type of person and multi-tasking just kills me right now.

When I take the leap, I will have a quad-core CPU, >= 4GB RAM, RAID 5, at least a 2-way SLI (but Quad SLI capable), and depending on the way the market pans out, probably a PhysX PPU. The only thing I'll carry over from the current system would be my X-Fi and maybe the flash card reader. Everything else will stay in the current case and become a media server. The 6800GT will either be sold or put to use elsewhere since a server doesn't need it.

One more thing, I keep seeing you refer to hybrid hard drives. I haven't seen anything about them in Vista. What exactly do you mean?

I believe I read that Spring of 07 is when AMD is planning on releasing quad core processors...Should be interesting on how they plan on approching it. Intel of course has rumors as well about quad core processors..but they'll a little behind the curve considering AMD jumped way ahead of the whole Duel processors before Intel started introducing there versions.

On the topic of reviews...overclockers is an amazing site on the latest tech talk. Of course you can always rely on http://www.tomshardware.com and sharky's as well for the latest info. I'm interested to seeing how AMD is responding to cornroe cause obviously AM2 isn't gonna cut it. Now even though all the benches released have all only been tested by Intel themself and no other's so who knows if they hold up. Still, Amd is gonna have to pull something big to keep up with the scores that Intel is flashing aroundf