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Draqonic on 29 November 2009
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Garcian Smith said:
Soleron said:

Socket 1136 is dead, except for $1000 Extreme Edition procs like Gulftown, or Xeons. Intel's roadmap shows all sub-$1000 processors being LGA1156 for the foreseeable future, with no guarantee that 2010's processors (Sandy Bridge) will be work in the current socket. 1366 is not a good long term bet, and 1156 is only if you believe Sandy Bridge will work in it.

Socket AM3, on the other hand, is used for all market segments now and will be used for the 2010 'Thuban' products and the 2011 'Bulldozer' products (likely in the $150+ range). So you get guaranteed two and a half years of socket compatibility.

I'm not a fan of the 'buy one GPU now, add another later' thing because in about a year's time when you'd want to do that you will be able to buy a new card for around the same price as the second one that performs better than two of them and has more features and uses less power than two. Example: 8800GTX -> 9800GX2, GTX280 -> GTX295, 2900XT -> 3870 X2, 3870 -> 4870, 4870 -> 5870. SLI/CF boards also have a premium when you could just use a normal board and a dual-GPU card like the GTX295 or 5870 X2.

In games, the extra RAM channels and memory bandwidth provided by LGA1366 won't increase performance. Core ix's Hyperythreading won't either; in some cases it helps performance. The only Core ix processor that is good value is the i5 750.

Overclocking is good on all sockets and boards at present (AM3, 775, 1156, 1366). There's no need to pay a premium for 'OC feature' boards when you can just buy an AMD black edition ($110 for an unlocked dual, $120 for tri, $166 for quad) and any cheap motherboard and adjust the muliplier.

This guy, unlike many others in this thread, knows exactly what he's talking about.

Again, to reiterate: There is no way to "future-proof" your system. You'll save a ton of money at the cost of zero performance by simply buying mid-range parts now and upgrading with more mid-range parts later.

No there is no way to "future-proof" a system, however buying a product once and then replacing it a 1/2 year later when a new game comes out is something nobody wants to do.