Hmm... Thats true about the windows part now I think about it: I have a few GiB of ram and never use more than 25% of it and linux uses that as cache for files. I haven't truly used windows as a primary os in a while though I always get roped into helping people out with it. Though I'm surpised to hear you say that there is no gaping difference between the 2600k against the fx8150 - I'll have to take that onboard since I've only heard negatives and my only experience was a bit of demo testing on a shop PC (an FX-6 something if I recall) and found that it coped like my OC'ed athlon. Guess its not a true comparison as I hear the FX chips can OC something impressive...

That is because AMD's stock coolers at least have some cooper in them
I'm so checking this out when I next do an upgrade... Mine is an old grey deal that feels sort of flimsy and I thought it was rather awful (though I suppose I was OCing...). For instance, when I first got my machine and wanted to see how far I could push it before things got unstable I had my hand on the cooler and it was still cool but while running prime95 the actual temperature was around 60C+ so I came to the 'crummy aluminium' conclusion about mine too

As for drivers I have no clue as to OS X's drivers - though I gather driver updates are primarily released with new versions of OS X. However I dont think that issue lies only with OS X... I've read some horror stories and been asked to get some games running on them... Its a miracle I haven't jumped off something tall in desperation yet . Though to be fair - the llano and APU drivers, although coming a long way in a short time, don't leave much to be desired either. On any platform. I guess the one nice thing about intel graphics is that out of the box experience.

At any rate Cybermonkey - if its 64 bit linux you need and don't mind not having all that good directx speed the open source Radeon drivers are excellent for all the 'pure' linux needs. If you need directx for wine gaming and whatnot then just grab a copy of fglrx from AMD, as much as people moan theres very few issues as of right now and although its not a laptop, the fglrx drivers are (in my experience) quite a bit more power efficient. Though given the radeon drivers' development pace I wont be reading these words and nodding in the near future And as for CPU I guess that if a PGD i7 user can say they can stack up then thats good enough for me though you'd have to assess your usage pattern as to whether its worth it. Great thing about AMD: Its all AM3+ (bar the APUs but hey, thats not what we're here for) so you can have any CPU you fancy So long you dont need the most cutting edge stuff. Performance wise. Theres some trippy stuff in Piledriver