I run these at the same time, dabble in gaming, and have an Antec NSK440 and ASrock 775Dual-VSTAon the way. I'm going to keep my PNY Geforce 6800GS AGP card and Seagate ata/100 hard drive (SATA soon?).
So,
E6400 or E6600? I currently have a 2.0ghz Dell from 5 years ago, so I know whatever I get will be hella faster, but I'd also like to get a better mobo and direct x10 card in a year or two. With the better mobo I'll have more overclocking options as well...
Also, I'm thinking of this RAM:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6820211011 Again, I'm not playing oblivion, so I want to be as reasonable as possible, but all these programs are fairly intensive, at least currently.
I guess I don't understand how powerful these new chips are/aren't. For what I do, will the E6400 be more than I ever need, or will I tell much of a difference with the E6600?
I do a lot of photoshop and illustrator work, also 3D rendering and basic video editing @ work with 2G of RAM and one thing I notice is that you can hit the 2G ceiling pretty easily when working with such apps so it your case, I'd advice you to concentrate on the RAM rather than on the CPU' it's much more important than the raw CPU power when it comes to graphics so my advice is:
Let the CPU be an E6400 or E6300 or even inferior (AMD lower X2s like 3800+ or 4200+ are cheaper if your budget is limited) and buy 2 X 2G sticks of RAM; If you want a PC that never freezes, no matter what you do it's really the move to make; and you still leave a couple of slots free.
You may have a faster processor but when you get over those 2G of RAM and memory is swapped on the HD it doesen't make a great diff if it is an E6800, a P4, A64 or P3; your PC will start working like sh!t.
