@L1D3N: Well you should. I had Vista 64 Ultimate. Windows 7 Ultimate is FAR better in performance and reliability than Vista is. You won't regret it. I was really not "WOWed" by Vista as ol Bill said I would be.
If you keep looking on eBay you can find deals, but you have to keep looking many times a day everyday. I just picked up one of two x2 939 3800 for $40 (w/ free shipping) after watching for a few days. The other one was gone shortly after I got one.
To say they are too slow for games today is not true. Not much software is dedicated ot using multiple cores due to the complexity of doing do, so it is left mainly to the OS nowdays. XP does not do very well in this area, but Vista does better even though it is bloated. Windows 7 does even better with multi cores. Realise when playing games, that when your video card cannot perform itself then must be done by the CPU to complete the task. This of course slows down your CPU. Having one of the newer OSs that can use the other cores to perform tasks when it sees one core being over taxed would be better. The real reason the 939 is slower compared to today's CPU is because the core size. The 939 uses 90 nanometer while the newest use 45 nanometer dies. This means the electrons have double the distance to travel to complete their journey.
I am a poor student right now otherwise I would have just gone with a new system. However after talking to the other "richer" students they indicate Quad Cores is extremely fast even while gaming. Now you got all that power divided between 4 cpus even if you have a crappy video card it would not make the difference. I am even told that the systems are so fast, the CPUs are idling a lot waiting for the hard drive. Too bad the solid state drives are so darned expensive.
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