Socket AM3 is
the way to go...
AM3 X3 720 Black edition are very easy to OC. Rumors are that you can convert them in to quad cores with a simple bios tweak though I have yet to flash my bios.
AMD socket AM2+ and Intel socket 775 are both slated to be discontinued this year. Since Intel is being lame and making two sockets you'll be forced to spend minimally $700 for 3GB, a motherboard, and a CPU. So socket AM3 is here now and much more affordable unless you're trying to play Crysis at 2560x1600 which there is no productive point in doing so except for overinflated egotism and a run away sense of materialism.
Have a gander at
socket AM3 motherboards however I must forewarn you about buying Asus products; they will RMA you a
used and
defective product if you RMA with them, not worth the risk. I'm currently using this
GIGABYTE GA-MA790FXT-UD5P motherboard of which you can read my review on Newegg and see
pictures of my parts here on the forums.
As far as a new video card is concerned you have two choices right now, ATI or nVidia. I'm running an 8800GT though I will later this year switch to ATI though I'm happy with my computer right now. The reason I won't go with nVidia is because they are being very deceptive about marketing their video cards and I can only advise staying away from them until they get their heads screwed on straight.
In general you'll want from most important to least the following considerations...
1.) If you're going to do any video games you
need a video card with no less then a 256 bit memory interface...that is the bus between the memory and the GPU. If it's smaller then 256 bit then if you overclock the memory you will have to overclock 2MHz on a 128 bit memory interface to get the same effective performance ratio of a 1mhz overclock (on the memory).
2.) If you plan on playing at resolutions of 1680x1050 I highly recommend no less then 512MB of video memory. Be forewarned again, if a model doesn't come with 1GB but some manufacturers sell a card with 1GB it's simply a cheap tactic to make you think it'll perform better, it won't. Pick a card, tell me what you want to do with it, and I'll help you determine if it's the best for your budget.
3.) Do you want to do a multi-GPU setup? If you don't game much like me probably not, one card will usually suffice.
4.) Do you have enough power for the video card setup you want to run? I recommend no less then 500 watts for a single card setup, preferably 600 watts and no less then 700 watts for a two video card configuration.
Hard Drives
Are you doing important work on your system? I run two RAID 1's inside my computer for maximum reliability. If you want both performance and reliability I'd recommend considering doing a RAID 0 for your C:\ and a RAID 1 for your D:\. In XP you can set your My Documents folder to an entirely different folder/drive so I always set it to D:\. Note that Vista and Windows 7 are both lame ducks and you'll have to manually move
each folder
individually so both OS's (and pretty much all future Microsoft OS's) are effectively dead in the water as far as serious production environments are concerned.
With a hard drive you'll want to consider...
1.) RPM (7200RPM is standard, 10,000 available on Raptors if you want to do RAID 0 in a serious fashion).
2.) Cache (16MB is now standard, 32 is now high-end).
3.) Warranty, I only recommend hard drives with a five year warranty.
You can find all this by using Newegg's advanced search options. You can really maximize the performance for your money if you choose wisely. Good luck and I'm subscribed to this thread to help you out more if you need.