The DX10 cards are coming soon with affordable versions.
The 8800GTS 320 MB is out for $300 and is a DX10 card. Next month ATi is launching its DX 10 line and will launch its mid level DX10 cards a month after. I suggest you wait till then for sure.
Don't expect quad cores to get cheaper any time soon though. Intel will have some new dual core chips out in 6 months, but they have little motivation to better their processors. The problem is that AMD has no answers for another 12 months. Everything they release is running too hot and not a good enough competitor. The latest AMD quad core processors are bloody expensive plus they need an entirely new mobo and RAM. Also they are really hot and not nearly as good as Intel's Kentsfield. Personally I don't see the quad core dropping in price till its usage becomes more main stream.
The quad cores have no advantage in gaming yet, and even in multi tasking they don't make a massive difference for casual multi tasking. Where they do make a huge difference is really heavy stuff like video encoding or running HD DVDs.
The reason they don't help in gaming? Well because only recently was the F.E.A.R. engine updated to take advantage of dual core rigs. The other engine that takes advantage is the Half-Life engine.
That's it. From a gaming point of view, even single cores are fine.
The only engine that is designed to take advantage of quadcore processors is the CryENGINE2. Crytek revealed their intentions in some interviews, but in the recent CES show they weren't running the game on a quad core rig. Reports say that it is just not worth it for programmers to have engines take advantage of so many cores.
I think the difference is that these engines aren't designed from the ground up with more than one core in mind. Apparently the Alan Wake engine will also be utilizing the quad core setup.
As for compatibility issues, you will only have them if you buy weird brands in RAM.
Go for Kingston because it is easily the most reliable. Sure it isn't a great overclocker, but it is the staple of RAM.
For mobos, 965 are definitely not the latest.
(edit: Yes they are the latest, my bad.)Go for the Intel 975x powered Asus or MSI mobos. You can also look up the Nforce 680i. If you use Kingston RAM with either of those you should be fine. It is when people go for ASROCK motherboards from China mixed with Gskill RAM from Hong Kong when that they get issues.
Even RAMS by OCZ, Mushkin, Patriot can give problems. Those RAMS are superb overclockers, but if you want stability, I would always suggest Kingston or even Corsair.
When motherboards are tested by manufacturers they use Kingston because of the stability.
But yes you should wait. Not because of processors, mobos or even RAM, but because the DX10 cards are going to be out in full force in two months. If you want something now, get the 8800GTS 320MB for $300. It is DX10 compliant and fairly affordable.
Here is some stuff on quad cores:
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=34916
WE spoke with many developers including some big names and we learned that they can’t make much sense out of quad or more core CPUs. They confirm that they can put two cores to good use but not much more. The main problem is that the performance is far from scalable.
You have to spend both time and money to resource the programmer to try to make sense out f the dual core CPU. It takes up to a year to optimise the game for more threads and even if you make the perfect job you can count on twenty to thirty percent performance increase, and this is the best case scenario.
Once you start making the multi threaded game you end up making and having the multithreaded bugs as well.
You can keep one core busy with the physics and collision detection, second core will have to wait for the score to move on with the Artificial intelligence while the third core could possible calculate the graphic data. In this best case scenario you have to realise that the core number two and three would always have to wait for the core number one to finish its job and pass the job to the cores two and three. In this concept there is absolutely no place for quad core as games are non parallel applications. A game developer expert said that you can use the core number four to stream and load the data in the game and this is what the guys at Remedy did at IDF quad core demonstration. But this takes time and money and it is not commonly embraced by developers.
Game developers are in the dawn of dual core programming and now all the sudden AMD and Intel wants them to go quad core. For the time being Quad cores are good for rendering and serves but not for games.
So if you want to play games, you can forget about quad cores, you simply don’t need them and can gain just marginal performance out of them. Give the developers some time and this might change, but we are talking quarters not months. µ
http://www.tgdaily.com/2006/11/14/opinion_quad_core_upgrade/
One application area that cannot quite handle the extra cores yet is gaming. Valve, developer of the Half-Life series recently explained its multi-core gaming strategy in detail and promised to bring multicore capability to its games in the first half of 2007. If Valve can translate its vision into reality, quad-core machines will be able to do stunning things with game code and enable, for example, physics simulations. Tom Leonard, one of Valve's multi-core gurus, told me that the first generation of dual-cores were somewhat of an disappointment for game developers, which turned very quickly into hope with the Core 2 Duo and sparked excitement with the quad-core.
While game developers are likely to have to invest more time and money into their games to take advantage of multi-core technology, games will become more "present" for the user. Leonard explained that "game worlds will be much more responsive to a player" and we will see a "transition where game characters will be as smart and interesting as they are good looking right now." Valve appears to be a game developer that may be playing an important role in determining how multi-core capable games will look like in the near future, but the company still hesitates to actually recommend a quad-core upgrade to its gamers. "We won't tell them to upgrade, and that is not really the question," Leonard said. "Our users will upgrade anyway."
So, will users with quad-cores have an advantage over users who are running dual-cores? Valve says no. "People tend to make this problem a little more complicated than it really is. We never would introduce a feature which would depend on a piece of hardware and could result in better players just because of that. We want to make our customers happy. Doing something like that would work against that goal, it's that simple," Leonard told me.
Here is an article on Alan Wake and how it
does take advantage:
With the move from single-core to dual-core processors well underway, and the imminent arrival of Intel's new quad-core processors, the push is on to find applications that will take advantage of all this multiprocessing power. Historically, games have been at the vanguard of demonstrating the power of new systems, and the move to multiple cores is no exception to this rule. While many developers have expressed frustration with the difficulty required to develop multithreaded games, others are more eager to jump on the bandwagon. One such developer is Remedy, who showed off their upcoming title, Alan Wake, at the Intel Developer Forum being held in San Francisco.
The demo was staged on a quad-core "Kentsfield" (Core 2 Extreme QX6700) processor that had been overclocked to 3.73 GHz. The game was described as a "psychological action thriller," and it did not lack for action. One of the major features of the game engine is a dynamic world renderer that has no visible seams or loading boundaries. To show this in action, Remedy employee Markus Mäki began a new game and immediately pulled back the camera a great distance, panning around the world in a manner usually only seen in tourism videos.
The world was not just a beautiful but static painting, either. Dynamic weather effects and volumetric lighting made the world seem much more real. A tornado was unleashed on an unsuspecting small town and objects were thrown around in a swirl of destruction.
How did quad cores make this possible? One core was devoted entirely to preparing scenes for delivery to the Graphics Processing Unit, or GPU. Another core spent all of its time working on physics calculations. A third handled internal game logic, with the fourth available for sound processing and other miscellaneous tasks.
The game looked extremely impressive, delivering a definite "next-gen" experience. Consoles such as the Xbox 360 that contain three CPU cores (and also the PS3, with its asymmetric design featuring a single core augmented by several smaller processing units) will also be able to take advantage of games that use multiple threads in this manner. As developers gain more experience dealing with the headaches of multithreaded programming, and dual and quad-core processors become more and more common, look for gaming to take a significant leap forward in terms of realism and graphics prowess.
The process is not easy, but the rewards are clearly great. Once a game is multithreaded, it automatically takes advantage of more cores, so developer should be able to ship a game that will run on single, dual, or quad-core CPUs, but perform better the more cores the user has. Unfortunately, writing multithreaded code is still more difficult than traditional single-threaded programming. Developers have to worry about issues such as race conditions, where two processors are modifying the same bit of memory at the same time without locking it, but overzealous use of locking can lead to deadlock conditions where each processor is waiting for the other one to release a necessary resource. However, developers that can handle these issues will have a major advantage in delivering games that really shine on the next generation of hardware.
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http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060929-7868.html
Intel's quad-cores have been released, and inevitably, there are plenty of propagandist "reviews" that tell you, "You have to have this now."
Uhhh, noooo.
Our objection to quad-core has been that there's no point laying out an arm and a leg for a processor until it either does you some real good, or it stops costing an arm and a leg. Problem is, neither is going to apply to most people any time soon.
Now those who insist you need one now aren't saying, "You need to buy this now because CPU companies need to make a lot of money off somebody these days," but it's pretty hard not to come to any other conclusion after seeing their benchmarks. Excluding a few professional apps which specifically use multithreading (and even most of them aren't terribly well optimized for four yet), there's little improvement from four core (and in all honesty, it's not like everything is tweaked up for two cores yet, either).
But of course they can't say that, so instead they begin by saying what their own numbers force them to say, but then, to make the marketing people happy, they pay the piper and tell you that games will be taking advantage of four cores next year.
You have to read these articles closely to discover that:
only a handful of games plan on using four-cores
they won't show up for about a year
the games won't take full advantage of all those cores
See that's why I don't see the price dropping. It will be two years before quad core is fully taken advantage of and thus made main stream by most developers.
