Battle for performance

You probably have seen the battle for performance both Intel and AMD fought. Right now, Intel has the best processors. None of AMD's Athlon could now beat an Intel's Core 2 Extreme. It has been announced AMD would be releasing the new "Phenom" processors, which, if released, would probably beat any Core 2 Extreme on the market nowadays. With a frequency of 3,0Ghz and four cores working on a single socket, the AMD phenom is a monster when it comes to heavy multithreaded applications and gaming. But it has not been released yet, so if you are looking for performance Intel is the best option now. However, it is not so easy to decide. Having a Quad Core Processor doesn't mean you will get a nicer performance than a Dual Core. It has been tested. A Core 2 Duo working at full overclocking against a Quad Core working at full overclocking (Both were Intel based computers) and the results showed they were more or less the same. So you should think about it before rushing to the hardware shop or you will regret it. Of course, if you're thinking of gaming with your new computer for long, go get a Quad Core, games will need performance in multithreaded applications soon.

What's going on with video cards???

Right now, nVidia is leading the market. Since ATI was bought by AMD it is not doing very well... nVidia's Geforce 8800 ultra leads the charts while ATI's Radeon HD 2900 XT is far from being first. But more performance means higher price, and that's what happens with those video cards, nVidia's best card is about 1,7 times more expensive than ATI's and the performance is about 15% more. However, it has been tested and ATI gets a nicer performance when working with multi gpu, so when choosing between SLI or Crossfire, i'd go for Crossfire, the problem is when a motherboard has been designed for SLI only.