I am tossing around a few idea's about upgrading my current XP system. Right now I am thinking of just uping the video card to a 6800GS or 7800GS (AGP) and then upgrade everything in 12-18months.

I have been looking at the 64 939 Venice cpu's (3200+) for a possible upgrade now (although more expensive than just a video card) but have seen these Opteron posts.

Are the Opteron's good for general purpose as well as gaming? I also do quite a bit of video encoding/decoding (MPEG-2, DVD burning etc.) How well do the 146's do all this over the AMD 64 Venice /XP Barton cpu's? And is the 146 okay or are there better versions of this type? (around the same price class of course)

Or should I just wait and check out the AM2's series when they come out?

Any advice is most appreciated!

Thanks





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Main system,
AMD 64 3700+ San Diego 1mb L2, ASUS A8v, 2.0gb Corsair Twin-X, PNY 6800GS(T) 256mb 16/6,WD 250gb 7200/8, Sony DRU-710a,LG DVD-16x, Windows XP Pro SP2, Enermax Noisetaker 420w, DSL

Video editing system
XP 2800+ Barton , ASROCK K7VT4A+, 1.0gb Corsair XMS Cas 2, MSI FX 5900xt 128mb, Samsung 80gb 7200/2, Sony DRU-810a DVDR/RW-DL & MSi DVD 16, Audigy Platinum, Windows XP Pro SP2, Antec 300w, DSL-Lan hookup.

The Opterons will perform about the same as their Athlon counter-parts. The only times the Opterons are better is when you compare them to Athlon chips with only 512kb cache (all Opterons have 1MB, so that's better) and when overclocking.

The Opteron 146 is better than the Athlon 3200, even at stock speeds.

I wouldn't worry too much about AM2 myself, at least not now. I'll look into it in a year or so...

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