Well, thanks to the price war Intel is starting there's FINALLY a chance for me to upgrade my system.  *sigh* alas, it's not as easy as it sounds.  I have VERY specific hardware needs.  For starters I didn't expect to be able to upgrade for a while so I got an AGP video card.  I've also got a gig of plain DDR...and my budget really isn't enough to upgrade more than the motherboard and CPU.  The MAIN thing is I want a dual core CPU.  That fixes those annoying lags caused by microsoft's criminally bad "multitasking" methods.  No idea why the fine folks at microsoft ever thought it would be a good idea to let the task have a say in when to relinquish control back to the OS.

Anyway, I'm looking at maybe this board and keeping my memory/graphics card.  I mean, I have the memory, the graphics card is pretty good.  My main thing is being able to get a dual core CPU and overclock it.  The only down side is that I may get stuck with this CPU.  It's plenty fast enough...it just uses so much power that I may actually need to stick another PSU in my case to power the drives and graphics card reliably.

The other option is to pick up a board like say...this one, sell off some RAM and then most importantly, sell my AGP ATI X800GTO and sell it for the price of a PCI Express ATI X800GTO (which actually works out to be a great deal for the person buying the card since it's only a couple months old and still sells for about 40% more than the PCI express card).  That (assuming I could do it) would be a LOT better as it would get me a system that I could upgrade for a while AND an immediate performance boost (like reencoding DVD's in about 15 mins!)

Now I know there's probably going to be a few AMD die hards out there saying "Why not get an AMD X2?"  Well, I'll tell you.  The main reason is, this processor costs about $300.  I DO NOT HAVE $300.  Oh yes, you're right, the X2 is faster.  BUT I DON'T HAVE $300!!!  I'd like to stress this point because I keep having to explain it over and over and over and over.  Yes, the X2 would solve that potential power problem, but I HAVE AN EXTRA PSU.  What I don't have is an extra $100 for the CPU on top of YET ANOTHER $50-100 to buy the fucking motherboard.  Yeah, it might fix that AGP problem but OH, what's that?  the CPU alone costs more than my whole budget, gee, that's right, it's a moot point.

Let's do the math again, shall we?  I'd just like to make sure the point is made.
$120 CPU + $100 motherboard + $70 RAM = $290 (going for the high end setup)
$120 CPU + $70 motherboard = $170 (low end setup)
$300 CPU + $50+ motherboard + $sub $300 budget = no fucking way

Ok, that's it...I'm done.  Of course it doesn't matter in the short term...I'm going to wait until the 23rd and see what the price is for the more efficient intel 9XX series of multicore processors.  I think there might be one for about the same cost as the 805.  That'll also give me time to *crosses fingers* setup a buyer for the "old" (as in, a couple months old) equipment...it would be nice coming out of this without a dependence on AGP.