I currently have an Athlon 64 3000, GeForce 6800 agp and 3gb ram. I am considering an AMD Phenom X4 with 2 ATI Radeon HD 3850 512mb, 4gb ram and a PhysX card. It will cost me about £80 more to get a core2quad and about £30 less for a pair of 8600 512s. I have Vista Ultimate 64 for my OS(love the company's tech net subscription). Where do you think my money should go? Is the core2quad worth the substantial price jump and is the 8600 a better buy for £15 less each?

Video card: Forget Sli and get a 8800GT or if you're can afford it a 8800 GTS512. Performance is better and there are issues with SLI.

CPU: The new C2D processors E8300, E8400 (price/performance) and E8500 are the one to get. Phenom are way too slow for now for the price.

PhysX card: it is already dead so if you want to waste your money. No game will make full use of it.

Upgrade to a Xbox 360!!!

*ducks and cowers under desk

I'd listen to guigr. Ditch PhysX and go for a Core2duo and 8800gt combo. If you still need to save money, just cut down on RAM. More RAM is always nice, but unless you do a lot of video editing you generally don't need more than 2gb. You can always just get more later anyway.

What he said.

Don't go AMD for multicore processors. And like guigr said; SLi and or/Crossfire setups are a big waste of money. 15% more power total for twice the price...

On the video card I would currently lean more towards the GT 512, the performance difference is pretty small in most games and in some games (like crysis) the GT outperforms the GTS. Considering the GTS 512 is still about 50-60 more (depending on where you shop) I think its worth the savings.

On processor I completely agree to stay away from Phenoms right now. But on the E8x00 series while I agree it will likely be a good line there are no benchmarks yet (that I could find at the usual sites) so I would also look at some other options still just to be prepared. IIRC they said it would debut around the $150-180 region and provided performance is where most expect it to be should be a good deal, but its hard to tell and having other options will prevent you from making the kneejerk reaction of "Awe screw it, I already had this planned so I am gonna stick with it." if there is a problem.

Other than that I agree to stay away from PhysX card, they are pretty much dead now that physics stuff is being integrated into video cards. Which ultimately we hope will lead us to a single fully integrated footprint with CPU & GPU.

@mummelman,

You are somewhat missinformed on SLI, while it is true that it is definitely an enthusiasts setup its not true that you only get 15% increase out of it...if you're an enthusiast. SLI gets a bad name from people who have no intention of using it properly and usually no idea how to use it properly. If you have a monitor that supports 1920x1200 or 2560x1600 and you crank up settings on games..a lot...thats when you start seeing the benefits of SLI where you can get 80% increases in power. If you want to play World in Conflict at 1024x768 with max settings SLI is not for you.

Don't get me wrong, SLI is still not what I would consider to be a great price for performance boost but its not as bad as many think it is.

edit: Supporting Benchmarks:

% increase for GT SLI ~81% @ 1900x1200

 % increase for GT SLI ~35% @ 1600x1200

% increase for GT SLI ~81% @ 1900x1200

but don't forget about power consumption also folks:

% increase for GT SLI ~56%

psst

wait for the new Core 2s and the 9800GX2 to be released. Prices will be lowered then just get an 8800GTX.

Thanks for all your advice, I took it all in, weighed the pros and cons and decided to upgrade step by step. Unfortunately this means having to use some spare parts we have at work. And the only spare part we have (apart from lots of ram and a few 7200s) that is an upgrade from what I have is a 6000x2 CPU, so I have gone for an Asus M3A32-MVP DELUXE. Into that I will slot a 7200 and 2 gig ram. In a month or so I will get an 8800GT 1gb, and then a better CPU after that.