you can get a tforce 570 as well, duno price check newegg.
amd's new chips are quoted to be 40% faster then current intel c2d chips.
this wont be across all apps but with 40% FPU boost you would see a huge perf boost in superPI.
i personaly dont bother with SLI or crossfire because by the time i would consider moving to it the fact is that i can just move to a new card and get the same perf that SLI would give but in moving to that new card i get another benifit, NEWER BETTER FETURES!!!!.
the way i look at it is SLI/CF is only for people who eather have HUGE high res HDTV's that want to game at 1080p res or 2, those who buy crappy video cards and want to beable to add another crappy card to it in order to try and get the same perf a good/great card would have given them.
the card i listed would be great for anything you threw at it today, and in a year if you deside to upgrade you can grab a new sli or crossfire board( more 16x slots) and use the x1950pro as a PPU(phsycs unit) thats the ONE place sli/cf boards make sence, to use the 2nd video card to run ppu type data.
imagin this, crysis on your x1950pro(running the gfx only) a 2nd video card say a x1300xt(1650pro) as ppu, being used PURLY for ppu use taking a huge load off the cpu
or in a year an x1950pro as the ppu and a x29** card as main videocard.
i have it on fairly reliable athority that we will be seeing more pci-e 1x mid range cards soon, x1300xt-x1650xt cards, imagin that as an upgrade path
slap a small video card in(256mb x1300xt) for PPU use and use ur 1950pro for normal gfx work.
blah im sure thats confusing.
but to be clear, check some reviews of the 3600+ windsor cores, it beets the e6300 in a few tests
(yes the conroe can overclock higher, but it also costs more to build a conroe overclocking system
)
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/athlon64-x2-3600.html
Conclusion
The obtained results indicate that the new low-cost AMD processor that has already started selling turned out a very attractive solution. Although Athlon 64 X2 3600+ features half the L2 cache compared with the “fully-fledged” dual-core Athlon 64 X2 CPUs and hence can be regarded as a “dual-core Sempron” at some point, its performance didn’t suffer that much. In the worst case, Athlon 64 X2 3600+ is no more than 5% behind the 3800+ model with the same nominal clock speed of 2GHz. And in fact, there are very few applications like that. In other words, Athlon 64 X2 3600+ offers very decent performance, especially keeping in mind that it is less expensive than the 3800+ model.
If we compare the performance of our hero against Intel Pentium D 915, which will most likely be its primary competitor from the pricing standpoint, the AMD solution turns out a definite winner. Just like before, the new AMD processor on K8 microarchitecture outperforms the competitor built on NetBurst. Even the recent price wars didn’t change anything, and the recently announced Core 2 Duo processors are still in a different price category.
The important advantage of Athlon 64 X2 3600+ is that it belongs to the Energy Efficient type with the 65W maximum heat dissipation. As a result, this solution will become very popular in quiet systems, because Energy Efficient dual-core AMD processors have always been a little bit more expensive.
As for overclocking, we managed to hit only 2.6GHz clock speed, which is not too impressive. However, on the other hand, the performance boost from overclocking appeared quite tangible. Athlon 64 X2 3600+ working at 2.6GHz can compete successfully with the top model in the family with 5000+ performance rating. So, those overclocking fans who decide to go with the new AMD CPU will be happy.
its good, now that its readly avalable in the states its a great buy!!!
also remmber that the guy doing the tests isnt a real overclocker(ofcorse you could probbly tell that by what he says when he talks about overclocking the chip) it takes tweaking to overclock any system properly!!!!
for the price this is going to make you far happyer then any pentium-d would.
and the pentium-d in this test is alot faster then the 805 mentioned above