Time for a new system

I was away from my computer for a while today, and when I came back, I found it powered off. After a little examination, it looks like the fan in the power supply died, the machine overheated, and powered itself off or the power supply just failed.

Lucky for me, I keep a few spare power supplies on hand just in case. Unfortunately for me, it looks like the power supply took at least one stick of RAM with it, and I'm wondering about the motherboard.

This system is an AMD Athlon 64 3000+ that's been in service for about two years. I was in the habit of upgrading my system every six to eight months, but I've been happy with this machine's performance and haven't seen much need to add any more systems to the collection. (I have at least 12 fully functional systems, from a Pentium II 233MHz system that is gathering dust, to a dual PIII 1.0GHz system that I use to run VMware Server and a bunch of VMs.)

If it's on its way out, I've at least managed to get some data off the system and I have several spares that can sit in for a few days or weeks while I check out other options.

I think that it's time to clean up a few of the older machines I never use and see if I can get a few bucks for them on Craigslist, and start shopping for a new system.

I've been buying AMD since 1999, since I had to replace a Pentium II 350MHz system that had gotten zapped by a close lightning strike, but I may take a look at Intel this time around. I'm about 95% certain that I want a Core 2 Duo system. I could get a fairly zippy system pretty cheap off of Geeks.com, but I want something that's dual-core, 64-bit, and with virtualization extensions, and with a motherboard that supports at least 4GB of RAM. I'm also seriously considering Intel for the first time in seven years because the company is doing a good job of releasing their drivers as open source.

I would be curious to hear from folks who have bought a new system recently. Any particular recommendations?