'...been away so long I hardly knew the place...'
...anyway: I have a desktop PC that I built way back in 2007 (specifics are in my signature). I used what was at the time a top-of-the-line CPU (AMD Athlon 64 x2 6000+ Windsor--a whopping 90nm chip!) on a Gigabyte AM2 motherboard and 2GB of DDR2-800 RAM. Also two 500GB SATA hard drives and two Philips IDE CD/DVD burners in a mid-tower case with a 500W power supply. The motherboard has nVidia integrated graphics (6150SE), and the system originally ran Windows XP MCE. It has been adequate for what the wife and I use it for, but with XP being dead now, I upgraded it to Windows 7 Home Premium. After an initial glitch (STOP code 0x0000005c), corrected by updating the BIOS using the '@BIOS' utility that Gigabyte provides, the Win7 installed nicely...but the 166 accumulated updates took forever to install!...and it is now running adequately on the system as it is.
...BUT--I am painfully aware that, after seven years, realistically the motherboard/CPU/RAM combination at the very least should be updated. (No more 90nm CPU architecture--everything appears to have gone to 32nm, which woule suggest they can pack a lot more into those chips...) And I am in a quandary. If I want to stick with an AMD processor (I'm not an AMD 'fanboy', but have had good experiences with them since way back in the 486 days), it appears I have two ways I can go: an FX-series processor (up to 8 cores!) or an A-series CPU/GPU combination (apparently AMD took some cues from game consoles like the newer XBox 360s (Trinity/Falcon) which use this approach). This is a home computer that does a fair amount of web surfing and some light to moderate gaming but nothing real heavy, so I guess an 8-core FX or a 4+8-core APU would probably be serious overkill. But which route would be the better way to go? Anyone with familiarity with the AMD processors and chipsets here who can give some advice on which way would be better? I'd greatly appreciate suggestions...