his budget is high enough to support a c2d so going with an athlon is almsot stupid, especially with the latest pricecuts. unless you're a huge virtualization freak, or are running a server AMD's chips aren't optimal anymore. They kicked ass from 1999-2006(excluding the golden age of northwood which lasted all of 6 months) I had the equivalent of an athlon x2 5600+ over a year ago. There is a reason why I sold it... c2ds just scale a lot higher and they're more powerful per GHz, they beat the athlons by triple of what the athlons beat the P4s by just at stock, and are as much as twice as powerful after overclocking(both). I hope to god K10 is better because I want to buy one if it is... the slowest quadcore CPu would effectively doubel the rate of transference. 2600XTs suck(for the money) FYI compare/contrast them to the cheaper last gen x1950pro. in around 70% of cases th x1950pro outperforms it. Merged Post: I did some digging. 3d rendering via D3d hasn't been disabled yet, so in the new version of 3dsmax, you can use a standard GeForce 8800GTS in place fo the notably more expensive quadros. Most everything else won't work though(EG: maya)
