I got most of the items on boxing day here in Canada and the total price is less than 1,000CDN without the monitor. I am picking up the stuff tomorrow 
Now, the real question is do you recommend blender x64 or x32? …taking into account the fact that I will probably be using 32bit windows most of the time.
Use x32 - afaik you will get no benefit from x64 and it will just need more memory to render the same scene.
Nice box! Those Conroes are supposed to be extremely nice chips.
Alex
x64 is actually faster due to the way calculations occur on the core, but you wont see any benefit unless you’re running windows x64 at the same time- the os has to be the same as the program.
btw woah memory has sped up a lot in the past year 
heheh… I think he means DDR2-800. Just for those folks who didn’t get the joke 
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No - he meant PC2-8000, as in PC-3200 = DDR400 usw…
PC2-8000 = DDR2-1000 anyway…
I take it one designation is based on bits and one on bytes for the 8 fold difference, but wikipedia will tell anyone who is interested…
@benstabler: So the Conroe can’t do native 32bit like Athlon64 can then? Didn’t know that…
Alex
Now, the real question is do you recommend blender x64 or x32? …taking into account the fact that I will probably be using 32bit windows most of the time.
If you have 32 bit windows you cannot run the x64 version. You need a 64bit OS to run a 64bit prog.
I’m not really sure what the question is but I assume it can- but if you’re in 64 bit mode things will run faster in general AFAIK (something to do with floating point calculations and memory registers)
edit: my knowledge of current hardware is fairly minimal (my only 64bit processor is a 2005 Sempron) so take what I say with a pinch of salt 
)
…however, this doesn’t really matter as what IanC said is true.
Edit: this link: http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/core2duo-64bit_4.html has some evidence for the speed increase during floating point calculations, although it looks like the core lags behind a bit during other calculations (although I believe floating point makes up the majority of the calculations in programs like blender that do a lot of matrix calculations on world space? Could be wrong though)
ajc158 is right, I actually meant DDR2-8000, as in 500mhz DDR2 memories(or 1000mhz once you double the frequency) . In fact, I got my hands on the extremely rare micron D9 fatboy chips, for those of you who isn’t in the ‘loop’, it’s well known as the Rolls-Royce of ddr2 memeories.
I havn’t seen many good comparisons of conroe running on 32bit and 64bit OS and apps. maybe i’ll post a detailed performance review of XP, XP64, and various distro of 32bit and 64bit linux running blender.
wats the difference?
@benstabler: So the Conroe can’t do native 32bit like Athlon64 can then? Didn’t know that…
Err, thats not what he said. Using a 64 bit proc can have processing advantages, if compiled right (due mainly to more registers, I think). Also, it lets you address more memory, which may be what you were thinking of.