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Message: <blockquote data-quote="drothgery" data-source="post: 2991504" data-attributes="member: 360">Core Duo isn't 64-bit capable. But Core 2 Duo is. Core 2 Duo is kind of expensive right now (when you can get one at all) because it's new and has excellent performance. By December, the whole line should be widely available, from the lower midrange E4xxxx series all the way up to the E6700 (and there will probably be a clockspeed bump, so there will be an 2.93 GHz E6800 in the non-crazy price zone and a 3.2 GHz X6900 replacing the X6800 as the $1000 part).Having said that, the latest price cuts have made most A64 X2s (except the FX models) fairly competitive with Core 2 Duo on price/performance (by virtue of some pretty serious price cuts). So an A64 X2 box isn't a bad value play. Neither is a non-EE Pentium D, for that matter; Intel cut prices to a point that mostly makes sense given Core 2 Duo performance, and if you get the right motherboard you'll be able to upgrade to a C2D later.Other notes -- Intel's 975 chipset doesn't support DDR2 800 memory, so if you're going that route (and if you value stability, it's the way you're going for a C2D this year), you can save some money with DDR2 667 without sacrificing much performance; the benchmarks that most big-name hardware sites ran (which had C2D stomping all over A64 X2) were with DDR2 667 in the C2D and DDR2 800 in the A64 X2.Core 2 Duo systems will be a lot more widely available and less expensive in December than they are now. Today, for example, Dell only offers them in the XPS 700 ultra-high-end consumer desktop, their top-end Dimension 9200 business desktop (you can't get it throug the home/home office store), and the Precision 390 low-end workstation (high-end x86 workstations are dual Xeon/dual Opteron boxes). But by the end of the year you'll see Core 2 Duo everywhere but at the extreme low end.</blockquote>

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