To wait or not to wait...

I was thinking of building a gaming rig in September with a Q6600, 8800GTX, and 2GB RAM but should I wait for the 45nm Penryns and Wolfdales to come out at the end of the year? Will these be a definite advantage to a 45nm processor to the ones this generation or will a Q6600 last me for at least 3 years down the road? Also, are these new processors confirmed for the end of 07? General computer usage and gaming are equally important. Thanks.

I guess you are not in a hurry, or you wouldn't be asking the question. It's worth waiting IMO, but only if you have a large budget and you're serious about not doing any upgrades to CPU or GPU for 3 years and you really need lots of processing power.

I'm waiting for a 3.16 GHz 45nm quad CPU and a 9800 GTX. On the other hand, just these two together will probably cost $2000, which means most people won't bother with them.

They are confirmed, as in "VPs from Intel and nVidia have made promises to investors in interviews". There's no 100% guarantee, but they might actually deliver on schedule. It's not like the ATI/AMD case where the merger has created chaos and schedules were blown.

A Q6600 will last you 3 years all right. An 8800 GTX should last you 3 years, unless you have a large monitor (1920x1200 or more) and you want to play Crysis or other demanding games with maximum eye-candy). Right now there is no GPU capable of handling DX10 properly, that's the main reason why I'll wait for the 9800 GTX. Even the 8800 GTX gets as low as 10 fps in some DX10 games or demos at higher resolutions, yuck...

Performance comparisons:
- the 3.16 GHz quad Penryn will have 31.6% speed advantage over the Q6600 thanks to frequency alone.
- add 2% to 6% thanks to the higher FSB (Anandtech compared QX6850 & QX6700 and got these numbers)
- improved floating point unit (may impact some applications a lot, e.g. CAD or Flight Simulator, others not at all)
- lots of new SSE instructions (may speed up video encoding by 40% with the right software)
- better power management, less power consumption, less heat, less noise from fans (at the same clock, that is)
- it will overclock better

Whether this is worth waiting 6 months and paying about $700 more, you decide for yourself.

The current CPUs can easily give you far more power than you need.
There is no need to wait.
Build the computer when you want and need it.

As previously stated, there will always be better stuff but even the cheapest E4300 C2D can easily be tweaked to provide extreme power.

In September, you will likely want to get a P35 Mobo and a C2D with a G0 Stepping. (Any 1333 FSB chip or the Q6600 which will soo migrate to that stepping.)

Ask in September though.

Make this a sticky!

Thank you all for your insightful posts. =) Aevm, just out of curiosity, what do you plan on doing with your build? Do you just have a thing for the latest technology or do you really need it? I'm assuming you have high expectations for it?

up12u, I think you should take your question to a new thread especially because it has nothing to do with mine.

Programming on weekdays, Crysis and Hellgate on weekends. I usually have lots of processes active - Visual Studio.Net, IIS, SQL Server, IE/Netscape/FireFox (have to test my program in all of them). Visual Studio.Net 2008 will show up early next year and based on Microsoft's history I'd rather have a Penryn to push it than a Q6600. I'm sure the Q6600 would do nicely, but even half an hour saved every day adds up over 3 years...