X-Mas 2011: What did you get/are you playing?

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@Lifepower:

Heres what I wanted: for around £410
ATI 5770 1gb GDDR5 version from XFX
AMD Phenom II 960t
ASRock 870 Extreme 3.0
2x2GB XMS3 DDR3 1600Mhz
64 GB SSD

Heres what I got by shopping around the stock crisis around christmas for a cut under £350:
XFX 5750 1GB GDDR5 which I've OCed to 5770 levels, but I don't need that much more juice
AMD Athlon ii X3 460 which unlocks to phenom ii b50e
2x2Gb XMS3 DDR 1600
32Gb Kingston SSDNow

For the money, considering the floods in thailand, I find this pretty good value coming from the C2D and intel world... The best bit is this: when piledriver is released for socket AM3+, I'll just sell off my athlon for, say, £30, and buy that instead! Problem solved. And for the GPU? Crossfire in a 5770 since they're compatible.

One thing I can't help but notice with your i7 rig is this: balancing. Your i7 can play things at 700fps (or some stupid number) BUT your GPU cannot... Unless you got 2 GTX 460s which would blow your budget. From what I hear the FX chips are not bad, but where not what we were expecting so be warned there. Its i5/i7 level performance, heres what I'm saying in a few points:

AMD:
+ Cheap
+ Clear upgrade path: AM3+. Piledriver etc... Overclocking and unlocking, free GhZ for no $£$£
- Sometimes more heat
- Not always the highest performance
Intel:
+ Next Gen performance
- Expensive
- Upgrade path is... 'Murky'? LGA1366, P67 etc etc etc. Intel likes change. a lot.
+/- Can run hot...

On the whole I'm thrilled by how my athlon is putting up a fight with skyrim I'm getting some nice FPS at high settings (ok, I oc'ed my card for this one, buts here its the GPU that counts). Its your call, intel for the next lots of years due to cost, or a cheap swap in replacement every 2 to 3 years for AMD? But do you need things running at 100frames/sec more than vsync?

PS: DDR2 - DDR3 Is a MASSIVE boost. As is an SSD, words can't express what a 10 second boot is like (from cold to desktop).