I’ve been look­ing for com­po­nents the last few days and I was able to come up with quite an inter­est­ing com­pi­la­tion of sin­gle parts. There are some things that need to be said first, though. Just for a bet­ter under­stand­ing of the choices I made.First of all, I’m gonna buy an Intel Core 2 Duo CPU, that’s for sure. I just don’t know which one. Depends on avail­abil­ity, sort of. Thus, I’m gonna get an E6600 (Con­roe). At first, I wanted to buy an E6400 (Allen­dale) but this CPU pre­sum­ably won’t be avail­able until the forth quar­ter of this year. Intel’s new proces­sors are fast and they have quite an advan­tage in terms of per­for­mance per Watt. With a TDP (ther­mal design power) of 65 Watts they stay pretty cool, while the new microar­chi­tec­ture as well as the man­u­fac­tur­ing process are cut­ting edge. Even though AMD has cut prices on July 23rd in order to stay com­pet­i­tive there is no rea­son to stay with AMD right now. At least, for me there isn’t. Since Core 2 Duo proces­sors with 4MB of L2 cache should start to show up on August 7th every­thing should go well.

As far as the infra­struc­ture is con­cerned, I’ll prob­a­bly go with the Giga­byte GA-965P-DS3 because I don’t need all that fancy stuff its big­ger brethren are offer­ing. This main­board seems to offer the best bang for the buck, being based upon Intel’s newest chipset, the P965 Express. Because of lack­ing IDE ports (there’s an extra con­troller on it sport­ing one IDE chan­nel) I had to think my con­fig over. Well, it’s time to get rid of my old Sea­gate Bar­racuda II 40 GB HDD. The rest of my HDDs already sport SATA connectivity.

Even though Con­roe isn’t that bandwith/latency depen­dant as its pre­de­ces­sors I’ll get bet­ter DDR2-800 RAM. I think I’ll buy a Mushkin DIMM Kit (XP2-6400 2048 MB CL4-4-3-10). These com­po­nents seem to offer good value. I’ve not decided on the remain­ing parts yet.