Originally posted by: Addikt
Even if you are going to wait for the next generation video cards they are still being released in AGP 8x and not PCIe (because it's not out yet). This means that even if you do wait you will still get your next gen graphics card on the older standards and upgrading the mobo will not be such a huge concern. As far as the socket 754 goes, I think that even with the release of socket 939 they will still support 754 for a while and I am not sure that the change will be as staggering as they are hyped up to be. After all this new socket allows for these improvements, and things such as taking advantage of dual channeled RAM is still under debate for the Athlon 64 series. I mean its possible on the FX but I mean that comes with a really high premium. By the time I will need to make MY next purchase I will probably be buying a whole new motherboard and graphics card with the PCIe standard and maybe even get an Athlon FX if the price comes down. We will see, but I have thought as many scenarios out as possible and I am not really interested in upgrading. Even if I wait 6-12 months I will not be able to upgrade because next gen graphics cards will not be on PCIe, or at least I don't think they will be. That might be wishful thinking, but worst case scenario is that nothing is upgradable and 939 brings about some HUGE differences (really a new socket can only bring about potential performance differences though, there is still and architectural design aspect that realizes these increases). Also I am keeping the price reasonable so I can afford for the system to be completely out of date in about 12 months. Good enough for me, I feel I have all the angles figured out.
June 1 will be the release date of the first AMD mobo with pci-e support (many more to come shortly after). Both Nvidia and ATI say they'll have their pci-e cards out by mid-June (maybe earlier??)
Socket 754 will be supported for quite a while as AMD moves their budget chip line to this platform.
I'm really waiting to see if there is a performance hit or benefit with socket 939 before buying (939 or 754). Heck, we can all see that the socket 754 3400+ performed on par with the FX-51 (dual channel)... I'm not sure how much a benefit AMD 64 will see with dual channel and they might acutally hurt from the loss of half their cache??? Hmmmm