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Original post by jonahrowley For $160 you can get an AMD X2 6400+ or for $170 an Intel Core 2 Duo E6550. The 6400+ performs better in benchmarks (and also overclocks well with a decent cooler) than the E6550. There's also the $10 or $15 you'll save on an AM2 board which are generally cheaper than LGA775 boards, mostly because AMD64 has an integrated northbridge (or half of it at least). So that's maybe $25 more you can put toward RAM or a video card.

The 6400 is faster in SOME benchmarks. As far as games go, the E6550 still wins. Another thing to consider, under load the AMD runs at 56 degrees using 146W. The Intel runs at 47 degrees and 118W. Plus Core 2 Duos have tremendous overclocking potential with their default heatsink and fan. Sounds like the Intel is a better buy to me.

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AMD almost always rates better in price/performance. This is their entire business model.

Apparently you haven't been paying attention for the last couple years. This hasn't been true since the Core 2 Duos came out. Intel has been dominating performance AND price/performance for quite some time.

I use high end AMD/ATI combo and I have no problems running crysis on high :D

My thoughts and recommendations are as follows:
Ditch some ram unless you plan on running a 64bit OS since it won't all get utilized.
Ditch the ATI card too if you plan on running Linux since it's linux drivers are subpar compared to Nvidia at best last time I tried using them.
Use that money to get at least a 74GB raptor if you are running Windows especially Vista since a 36GB drive get full pretty fast these days.
At least my 36GB raptor always seems to run out of space after all the windows updates,pagefile,etc.

Are any of the 10,000 rpm drives actually quiet? Any I've been around sound like a turboprop revving up.

Also, isn't the non safe RAID Setup generally cheaper for the storage volume compared to most 10,000 rpm drives? (You pay more upfront, but start at like 3 times the storage for the same cost)

You can get a 750GB hard drive for the same price as a 150GB raptor. I'd rather have three cheaper drives in raid 5. Get a speed bonus and data redundancy.

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Original post by tstrimp You can get a 750GB hard drive for the same price as a 150GB raptor.

The point of a Raptor is that it's fast, not high capacity. 150GB is still a lot of space, I'm using a 120MB and it's more than enough. Then again, I don't have 50 games and 200 movies on my drive. But who wants that anyway?

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Original post by jonahrowley Quote: Original post by tstrimp You can get a 750GB hard drive for the same price as a 150GB raptor. The point of a Raptor is that it's fast, not high capacity. 150GB is still a lot of space, I'm using a 120MB and it's more than enough. Then again, I don't have 50 games and 200 movies on my drive. But who wants that anyway?

Yes, but for nearly the same price of a 150GB raptor, I can buy 3 320GB 7200RPM drives, and put them in a RAID (AKA, reading faster than the 10,000 drive when well maintained, plus I store more AND they can be recovered after the drive fails. Don't 10,000 RPM drives usually have a higher failure rate than the 7200s?)

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Original post by Talroth Are any of the 10,000 rpm drives actually quiet? Any I've been around sound like a turboprop revving up. Also, isn't the non safe RAID Setup generally cheaper for the storage volume compared to most 10,000 rpm drives? (You pay more upfront, but start at like 3 times the storage for the same cost)

Not as loud as noisy as a scsi drive but still sond like a turboprop unless you put them in something like the antec P180 case with rubber grommets that muffle the sound. I got 3 raptors in my main system and I can hear the GPU and cpu fans before I can hear any noise from the raptor drives.
And yeah the new large sata drives like the 750GB and even 500GB ones are so fast now with their onboard buffers,etc that their burst speeds actually rival my raptor's speed. Raptors are still faster for bootup,snappiness and sustained speed though due to their low access times.
So if you need more space than speed get one of the new terabyte drives.

p.s. raptors have 5year warranty so you'd probably upgrade before worrying about it dying.

I have a 74gig 10k rpm hard drive and one of the new 1 TB drives, and all my benchmarks tell me the large drive is faster. I've heard the same from other people as well. Plus it has 937 megs of actual storage when formatted, which has to count for something.

Intel beats AMD at pretty much every level now. I bought an 'Intel Dual Core' @1.8GHz for ~75USD. I've overclocked it to 3.2GHz with the stock cooler. It runs faster than all but the highest model Core 2 Duos. The 'features' that were removed in the Dual Core version I didn't need anyways... or at least I didn't need to spend an extra 300usd on.