I just recently upgraded from a 3800 X2 with 1.5GB of RAM (I bought it back when dual cores first came out for an outragieous price). I now have the AMD 5400 with 2GB of Cosair RAM. I read a ton of reviews on the net about the newer CPUs and faster RAM, and to be honest my programs do run a little faster but it is not a heart stopping jaw dropping shocking speed increase like people on the net describe. That is why I never go out and buy the newest and most expensive techonology out there since I am sure the speed increase is not as great as everyone makes it seem. Even Unreal Tournament 2004 isn't silky smooth at max settings and that game is four years old. Oh yeah I have a Geforce 7900 that I bought two days after it came out. I may wait for the Geforce 9 series to upgrade again and hopefully they will make their cards smaller.

AM2 is phenom compatible, might want to try that if you want to have performance gains. Also geforece 9 should be out here soon. Also I have 939 and next I will be getting am2+ instead of am2 for the phenom. Jim R

Yeah that is why I decided to get an AM2 board since I figured better Phenom processors will come out later. However even so I bet those Phenoms will not be jaw dropping fast either compared to my current setup.

"AM2 is phenom compatible, might want to try that..." Most AM2 boards are NOT "Phenom ready"...Tom's Hardware just had an article about it: http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/12... And here's the current Phenom Ready motherboard list from AMD: http://products.amd.com/en-us/Recom... "I read a ton of reviews on the net about the newer CPUs and faster RAM" Then you most not have read the right articles. If you had a decent S939 setup, there was no compelling reason to "upgrade" to AM2. There's little difference in the CPUs other than higher clock speeds & there is very little performance difference between DDR400 RAM & DDR2-800 RAM on the AMD platforms. You would have been better off sticking with what you had & either overclocking the 3800+ or simply upgrading to a faster X2 CPU. Or you could have built a Core 2 Duo system instead. You didn't mention the motherboard or the chipset it's based on...that makes a difference too.