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Asher is right; wait for Conroe chips to be released 
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Conroe's will absolutely kick ass, while AMD's socket 939 chips are already plummetting in price, and increased competition between AM2 and Conroe chips and boards will drive prices down.
Personally, I think that AM2 is a bit of a wipeout. DDR2 memory typically has a higher latency than DDR, which pretty much negates the Athlon 64's advantage of an onboard memory controller. Meantime, the higher bandwidth of DDR2 allows Intel's new chips to really fly.
As far as your graphics card is concerned, what are you really using it for? If you just need reasonable frame rates on a 1280x1024 monitor, see if you can pick up an old 7800GT, or a 7600GT, or X1800XL. If you want more, you pay more unfortunately. The Radeon X1900XT is a good (if somewhat noisy) buy. A good compromise would be a Geforce 7900GT... amazing graphics with power to spare and easily £100 cheaper than an X1900XT.
Nevertheless, if you want my advice, if you need a reasonable system now, buy mid range components... say a cheap socket 939 AMD 64 X2 chip, like the 3800, a solid nForce4 SLI motherboard, and a Geforce 7800 or 7600 GPU. When Vista is released, driver issues will be take time to be resolved, as will compatibility with existing games. I think it'd be best to wait until perhaps 12-18 months from now to really splash out on a hardcore gamers PC.
.Conroe's will absolutely kick ass, while AMD's socket 939 chips are already plummetting in price, and increased competition between AM2 and Conroe chips and boards will drive prices down.
Personally, I think that AM2 is a bit of a wipeout. DDR2 memory typically has a higher latency than DDR, which pretty much negates the Athlon 64's advantage of an onboard memory controller. Meantime, the higher bandwidth of DDR2 allows Intel's new chips to really fly.
As far as your graphics card is concerned, what are you really using it for? If you just need reasonable frame rates on a 1280x1024 monitor, see if you can pick up an old 7800GT, or a 7600GT, or X1800XL. If you want more, you pay more unfortunately. The Radeon X1900XT is a good (if somewhat noisy) buy. A good compromise would be a Geforce 7900GT... amazing graphics with power to spare and easily £100 cheaper than an X1900XT.
Nevertheless, if you want my advice, if you need a reasonable system now, buy mid range components... say a cheap socket 939 AMD 64 X2 chip, like the 3800, a solid nForce4 SLI motherboard, and a Geforce 7800 or 7600 GPU. When Vista is released, driver issues will be take time to be resolved, as will compatibility with existing games. I think it'd be best to wait until perhaps 12-18 months from now to really splash out on a hardcore gamers PC
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