[Porsche-O-Phile]

Hey all,

I was in Fry's Elecronics last night pricing some stuff for a laptop I recently bought and figured since I was there I'd brush up on what the newest technologies were for desktop PC hardware. My current desktop is kind of aging (homebuilt AMD Thunderbird 1GHz processor, 512MB RAM, etc. . . ) so I figure I'll probably retire it in the next 6-12 months and build a new one so I can stay reasonably current. I need to be able to run modelers like 3D Studio, Form Z, SketchUp as well as stuff like Photoshop, Illustrator, AutoCAD and Revit - preferably without ridiculous delays. My current system can do it, but really slogs down when the models or renderings get complicated.

Anyway I looked at the rack of motherboards & processors - seems like the most cutting-edge stuff at present is dual-core Opteron units (64-bit) running about 2.5GHz with front-side bus speeds of 333 MHz. Is this true? Is there faster/better stuff out there? I think the pinset on the most "fresh" looking motherboards was a socket 939 or something like that. I used to be really into this stuff (built a ton of Pentium, PII and related systems from that era), but stuff has become way more non-standardized now and I'm not sure what the "stuff to watch" is.

Suggestions welcome from the tech geek corner.