All Gigged Up and Nowhere To Go...

This is frustrating. Over the last 2 weeks, I have been trying to get a hold of an Athlon 64 processor for my upgrade. There aren't any. Boards they have a lot of, but no AM2 Athlons. The first time I went around, I got a sense of what I could buy. I was looking for one of those energy efficient Semprons that run on 35W. They did not have any on stock. They had the regular ones. For each of the 2 shops I went to, they had one piece each of a Sempron 3000+ (with 256 L2 cache) and a Sempron 3200+ (with a 128 L2 cache). Both crunched numbers at a whopping 62W, same as the Athlon 64's. So thinking I wouldn't be saving on the power consumption, I decided to go with an Athlon 3000+, which had double the L2 cache of the Sempron 3000+ and built-in support for virtualization. Alas, none can be found. Shop owner 1 promised he'd have one delivered to him last Friday, but I went there and he said there was a delay since the distributors called an early holiday for their employees. Shop owner 2 on the other was a bit more chatty so I went ahead and explained my predicament, saying I needed an enery efficient Sempron with the Athlon as a second choice. He was very afront about AMD though. He apologized (he must've sensed I was an AMD fanboy by the way I threw around all those acronyms) and said that "to be honest, disadvantage po sa amin ang mag-stock ng AMD kase hindi steady ang upgrade plans nila, 'di tulad ng Intel na iisa lang ang socket para sa last-generation 32-bit hangang sa mga dual-core na 64-bit." Sadly, he has a point.

So, where am I today? I bought a Gig of RAM from shop owner 2. They sold me a Kingston KVR533D2N4 stick for only 5,100. Great price! Unfortunately, its the only piece I have. I really do not want to go the Intel way (a matter of presonal preference). However, if I don't get anywhere in the next week or so, I'll be forced to look at an Intel proc and motherboard just to see what my options are. Budget-wise though, an AMD is my best option.