[IceFire]

If your going the 939 Athlon64 single core then if your tossup is between the 3700+ and the 3800+ go for the 3700+ its cheapter but it has a larger cache size and therefore its speed difference is minimal and its nearly identical with the 3700+ pulling out infront in a few tests.

If you can wait...the Socket AM2 Athlon64's are due out in June according to several news sites and an AMD rep I was speaking to.  Its got a new core and the memory controller has been upgraded to DDR2-800.

[CP5670]

One thing to keep in mind is that the cheapest dual core is $300 while the single core Opteron 144 can be had for as little as $135 (the price seems to have fallen a lot recently). For a gaming oriented computer, I would only buy a dual core once the graphics hardware has been more or less maxed out. That saved money could be put into the video card, which would yield a much larger boost over any processor you could buy.

Can't comment on the stock cooler though.  I just slapped my XP-90 back on.  Figure I'll send the opty heatsink with the winchester if I ever get around to selling that thing.

That's exactly what I did. Although my 146 just came with the crappy basic cooler.