I do some video and photo editing. And what is even more CPU intensive, I do
some CG work on a hobby level, mostly using Maya. The reviews I've seen show
that going to dual core does give something approaching a doubling of
performance in render times. So I do have a practical reason for wanting to go
in that direction (as opposed to probably the majority of current "mainstream"
applications, which probably won't benifit too much from going dual-core). I
had the computer render a test image last night that took around 8 hours to
render on that 1Ghz Duron I had to downgrade to-- so even if I could afford an
FX-60 I'd probably looking at something on the order of 1 hour per frame, maybe
more.



Well then you will definately want to dual core AMD...

What I did with her old system (an XP-2200 with 1 gig of RAM) is look at
the system resources used while she was saving a large image file she
had edited.
The CPU usage was pegged at 100% for about 2 full minutes...
but the RAM usage was not maximized.


After the new machine was built (X2-3800 with 2 gigs of RAM)
performing a similar task...the CPU usage also shot up to 100%...
but for only about 8 seconds!
So the money was worth it.

Up until I built that machine I had been quite used to building machines
for next to nothing...by only using components that were slightly (to
extremely) obsolete...
so this was a new experience here.
Of course...if you have the money to spend...the FX-60 would be nice I'm
sure...but since you have to pay so much more for maybe not that much
improvement...I just could not justify going above the 3800.

Anyway I would have a look at Monarch Computer as they really do have a
good mobo selection. Also ...I opted to have them pre-install the cpu
and RAM and perform a burn-in test.
Even though I've probably built 500 machines by now...their cumulative
value is less than the one I just assembled...and I wanted the peace of
mind!