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[gofreak]

I've looked around a couple of hardware sites, but can't seem to find any mention or roadmaps for what's going to be available by the end of 2004 - can any PC hardware gurus here shed some light? The reason I ask is, I am thinking of upgrading by Christmas. My current PC is 2.5Ghz, 512Mb, 9700Pro box, so it's not too shabby at all, but I'd be willing to sell it off and splash a bit of cash if I could get a significant performance improvement. I guess that's more possible if I wait till the end of the year - I suppose PCI-express motherboards will be more generally available..? New videocards (will they be a good step up?)? New CPUs? Are there any big trends coming our way that I should hold on for? Some general advice on what the future holds (i.e. up until Dec 2004), or links to such info, would be cool. Thanks!

 

[DonasaurusRex]

Few new things. For one SATA II is coming *hopefully on the nforce4* which will supposedly have 300MB transfer rates , 2 times that of SATA I. Of course PCI Express is going to slowly be adopted more, the real advantage for that was your peripherials like nic cards and sound cards would have a much faster bus than the dated PCI 33~66mhz bus. However now things are pretty much integrated into the motherboard so ...we'll see about that. Memory wise it will be interesting to see if DDR2 takes off or if its just a stepping stone before the much praised DDR3 makes a splash. Video cards I couldnt tell ya. CPU's will be big in 2005, first dual core processors from IBM, INtel and AMD are expected in the 1st half of 2005. The question is will MS have NUMA support in the common mans windows. Next year will be a shaky one for intel imo, I believe they are scrapping their p4 line by next year and hope to have a more competitive design *most likely the dothan* so that amd doesnt just run away with it all next year. Perhaps they too will adopt an integrated northbridge design and get rid of that horrid shared bus architechture. On the other hand Intel is supposedly releasing a 4ghz processor early in 2005. Along with desktop processors that are 64bit compatible...i dunno if they are available in desktop configurations yet, i believe the server chips that are x86-64 are out now though.