Ahhhhh!!
For the past couple years I've had a system I was pretty satisfied with but over the past 6 months or so I've been warming up to the idea of dropping some gold on a new system and have just recently starting shopping, trying to figure out what I want...and get up to speed on what's out there! Jeeze!
I was just starting to warm up to the idea of nVidea's nForce2 chipset when I read that nForce4 is now out there somewhere...then memory: PC3200, DDR400, PC 2700, DDR2!! And processors! How do you compare them?? I'm going to go insane trying to straighten them all out and make a good pick!
In any case, I'm leaning towards giving AMD a shot again and am liking the sounds of an Athlon 64 X2 4400+ with 2GB RAM (a kit of Corsair XMS-3200C2).
As for motherboards...that's still a little fuzzy mainly because I'm trying to learn what I can about the current/upcoming chipsets.
I've been reading articles at Tomshardware.com primarily with a couple from CPUPlanet thrown in to fill in gaps. This tool from Tom's is actually quite cool and is helping me boil down options for CPUs.
The nice thing is I'm in no rush - in fact it'll be quite a while before I'm ready to buy so I don't have to rush to pick anything out.
Any good sites for tech-selection information would be appreciated! I'll look in on AlienWare and a few of the other packagers but I typically prefer to craft my own.