It seems to me that the best option for a build to be easily upgraded in the future is to go with AMD. I know that intel holds the performance crown but i don't want to have to buy a new CPU, mobo and RAM every time i upgrade. If i can stretch the budget this summer i'd like to build a new machine with a budget of about £1k It will be used for media encoding, folding and gaming. Energy efficiency is preferred though not a must and overclocking will also happen. So, any ideas?
No idea if next year's AMD chipset is going to use todays motherboards. I am no expert but I don't think they will. If you are sticking AMD you will be loking at the newer CPU's with turboboost. I would forget future proofing and sell your CPU/MOBO every year or so and buy a new one. There should be plenty of life in DDR3 so you can hold onto them for a while. For folding yo need to buy NV cards. Not sure how Fermi is shaping up for this and how they compare with previous generations.
rumour has it both companies will be shifting sockets, so neither platform offers future security. So buy the best you can afford now. depending on the roll of use depends greatly on what platform to get.
Maybe i shall save my money then and wait about a year and find out what Sandy Bridge and Bulldozer (i'm sure it is Bulldozer that is AMDs next architecture) have to offer in 2011