would be kind of pointless to switch after everything has be installed

if you dont mind me asking (and its a better reason to change the mobo)... considering you switched all the core components why did you stick with amd?

I vow to be on the AMD ship come hell or high water and you'll have to pry an AMD CPU from my cold dying hand as rigor mortis sets in before I would buy anything from that other place.

Why; you think I should've went Intel? I've been out of the loop. I just know that the 4200+ I had before (I think it was 2.2GHz) would spank a 2.2GHz Intel at the time.

From my first 386/40Mhz I've always liked AMD better.

simply because for gaming and normal desktop use (not so much for server and other intensive tasks) intel completely wipes the floor with amd at the moment
theres just not competition:
http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=3127&p=7
keep in mind that those are the old conroe cpus so with the new 45nm penryns the intels will be a tad bit quicker

shit, I didn't know that. It used to be the other way around not that long ago.

Oh well, too late now and what I have is a lot better than what I had.

welll with you talking about changing the motherboard again i thought maybe theyd let you grab a different cpu too

They might do that, not maybe I'll check and see if you really think the difference would be that significant. According to that link, Intel CPUs that are 2.6GHz are faster than my 3.2GHz AMD?! Good greif. I'll have to check and see what the cost difference would be to get much better performance; there's no sense in spending the same to get a slower chip that performs the same anyway... If I can spend the same or maybe very slightly more to get something significantly better then perhaps I'll do that. Not sure on their policy since the heatsink is installed and the ship will be smeared with thermal paste.

then again it doesnt hurt to ask and they must be used to you returning stuff by now

as for the price difference at least round here a penryn e8300 with 2.8ghz is only marginally more expensive at around ~10€ more... plus core2s are known for overclocking really well

Quote from Ball Bearing Turbo :

They might do that, not maybe I'll check and see if you really think the difference would be that significant. According to that link, Intel CPUs that are 2.6GHz are faster than my 3.2GHz AMD?! Good greif. I'll have to check and see what the cost difference would be to get much better performance; there's no sense in spending the same to get a slower chip that performs the same anyway... If I can spend the same or maybe very slightly more to get something significantly better then perhaps I'll do that. Not sure on their policy since the heatsink is installed and the ship will be smeared with thermal paste.

An E8400 @3.0 GHz costs around 190-220 dollars. Any P35/X38/48 board should support it.