Pentium D is terrible for gaming. You'd be better off with an Opteron 146 (or an A64 San Diego, or a Venice if you are on a budget, FX57 if you have plenty of cash), plus an nForce4 board and a 6800/7800. Or, you could wait for Intel's next platform to take off, I know for a fact it kicks pretty much everything out there, and it's still based on the PIII Tualatin. Owned. Although, you'd need for Asus to release a board that supports mobile chips (their upcoming mobile chip is going to be pretty good), as well as the product lineup to be released. Intel's current range (excluding the Pentium-M Dothan 7x0 series with an Asus board+adapter) sucks ass for gaming, it's a fact. They kick quite a bit of ass in A/V work, but when it comes to gaming, AMD is much better value for money, and performs better. Unless you splash out for one of those Pentium Extreme's with too much cache for any app to take advantage of, or a Dothan, Intel is pretty much shit at gaming. On DDR2, it has improved a ton as far as latencies go, but it's still lagging behind DDR1, which is capable of 1-2-2-5 (very very low latency) on nForce4. And on the Dell matter, Dell use refurbished components, and sometimes defective components which no other OEM will accept. Remember when your 9800 died a while back, ZombieLoffe? Blame Dell's component QC. They use components which are pretty much dead quite alot of the time.