For stability reasons I would still recommend a power supply of about 500-750Watt. A HD4870 and Q6600 is a different story than with a Phenom 9850 (a processor I wouldn't recommend as it's not quite as fast as Intel's competitor).
Well what's your point here? Why is a Phenom 9850 which consumes more power than a Q6600 plus a HD4870 which consumes way more power than a HD4850 being a different story? With that said your 500 watt plus recommendation is a bit off the scale...
When talking about speed differences there are no huge differences between a 9850 and a Q6600. The Phenom is faster on these applications and the Q6600 on those applications. So the Phenoms disadvantage is the power consumption while the advantage is the cheaper price for mainboard and memory plus downwards compatibility for future CPU designs to come...
As far as mainboard goes, you'll have to think about whether you want to jump on the DDR3 bandwagon any time soon. The newer RAM is worth it in terms of performance, however it's mad expensive to get even just 4 Gb in comparison to DDR2 ram.
There's hardly a difference between DDR3 and DDR2 RAM except for the fact that DDR3 is way more expensive...
I personally wouldn't bother buying a Vista 64-bit OS, but word has it it works better and better in terms of programs supporting 64bit.
I'd just make sure that there are 64bit drivers for all your components (especially printers and scanners) existant so you actually can use them...
The statement that games still struggle with dual cores and quad cores is total nonsense by the way. All Xbox360, PS3 games and just about every PC game released after 2006 are able to handle dual cores and quad cores just fine, taking full advantage of them. They really use multi cores more and more effectively, some games do this better than others, but you'll notice heaps of difference between a Quad Core running Crysis and Dual Core running Crysis... In fact there's usually a massive 40% to 60% increase of performance. Price-wise you can't go wrong with a Q6600 or newer quad core either...
Well I'm sorry but this is totally wrong. Currently we just have reached the state where most titles support two cores. There still are extremely few games that really support four cores and even if they do things like 40 to 60% increase is just insane (as you can't really parallelize games to such an extent). The only examples of a good use of a quad core is Supreme Commander (although the difference isn't THAT big here), Assasin's Creed and Race Driver Grid (which actually reacts pretty good with four cores). With that I'm talking about a siutation actually being
real and not some benchmarks at 640x480 with all settings at low. The GPU still becomes the bottleneck way faster (especially with AA and AF) and so you in most cases better use a Dual Core with higher clocks which doesn't really make a difference in modern games and is faster in games which don't use four cores yet. I also don't see the broad use of four cores coming THAT fast. I mean have a look at how long it took to have a dual core support about everywhere. Quads are something only a rather tiny percentage of users own already and so it'll take quite a while until you'll find such a support in nearly every game.
You now can think of getting a quad now if you want to keep it for quite a while (under the presumption you'll mainly use the PC for gaming). On the other hand you won't really have a huge advantage from that as your graphics card will limit you way sooner in coming games. So from a gamer's point of view it makes more sense to switch to a Dual Core with high clock and spend the money into a better graphics card like a HD4870...
To prove what I said have a look at these benchmarks:
Assasins CreedCrysisUnreal Tournament 3EDIT:
I've seen higher (depending on where you look). It depends on the sticks, the amount of memory per stick, etc. But, you are correct, it is not a great deal. However, the CPU needs power as well (duh!). The Q6600 can require 100 watts (or more) under a heavy load (not at idle). If you are running something heavy (like a decent 3D game, for example) and you have both the video card pumping and the CPU, then you begin to draw some serious watts. Add to this the RAM (as previously mentioned) and other little things that are drawing power and it all adds up.
I still don't see your point. Well even if we pretend that the Q6600 would drain 100 watts (which it doesn't because TDP is not power consumption) and the HD4850 like 120 watts then we end up with 220. Add up all the rest which are quite small consumers and you still should end up below 300 watts. So why is my recommendation of around 450 watts not enough or not appropiate. I even could get a tad lower but as you (I think it was you) said why not keep some room for the futre...
Enjoy your meal
Toast
