I agree with LoganTeamX with everything but one thing. Smart AMD fans and for that matter smart Intel fans will wait intill 2005. 2004 is going to be rather bad, Its sensless to get a AMD 64 when 90mm will be out later this year but next year is when higher speeds will show up. Now onlt that but with DDR2 and PCI express around the corner its all the more reason to wait.
Since many here overclock, many should know that getting Prescott is also bad. Intel is having to max out the voltage on them just to get them to run at high speeds meaning there will be little to no room for overclocking.
Heck Im still running a GeForce3 which plays all my games just find at 1280x1024x32 execpt for Uru but danm the graphics in that game are so good I think it would bring a 5950 or 9800 pro to its kness.
As for the game bringing the fastest super computer to its knees, I dont think so......specs for the Earth sim:
* 5,120 (640 8-way nodes) 500 MHz NEC CPUs
* 8 GFLOPS per CPU (41 TFLOPS total)
* 2 GB (4 512 MB FPLRAM modules) per CPU (10 TB total)
* shared memory inside the node
* 16 GB/s inter-node bandwidth
No game will ever bring 5,120 cpus to there knees and since the whole thing has 10TB of ram, you can just install the game on to a ramdrive. You could run only a 2d card, sim a GF 5950 and it will more the likely still run the game so fast that it be unplayable.
EDIT:
Just saw this and had to post it. The 6th fastest computer in the world is based on AMD's Opteron chip.
Aslo, out of the top 10 fastest all but the new Earth sim are located in the US