Help! Someone! Help! I'm being drawn to the Dark Side! The i850E with PC1066 is calling me...
Seriously, I'm like don777: upgrade infrequently, flash bios all the time.
Since I am "in heat" again, metaphorically speaking, I'd like to get technology that is solid right now, and worry about tomorrow, uh, tomorrow. I do like what I read about the 648/ddr400, but one thing nags me: even ddr400 can't slake the thirst of the P4 Northwood at 533fsb. The Rambus pc1066, well, Old Frank and Bert said it this way at THG:
Here, you should keep in mind that the Intel Pentium 4 has a maximum bandwidth of 4.2 GB/s. In the near future, this will reach well over the 3 GHz limit. Only Rambus memory in the form of PC4200 (533 MHz) is capable of taking full advantage of this bandwidth. By using DDR SDRAM, such as DDR266 or DDR333, the bandwidth remains restricted to 2.1 GB/s and 2.7 GB/s, respectively.
And that leaves ddr400 at 3.2 GB/s, which still leaves our P4 thirsty. There's just something "right" about memory and cpu that top out at the same level.
So the Dark Side is calling me, Gigabyte 8IHXP...