Upgrade to E6300 need help

[atp777]

I am looking to upgrade to an E6300 for mainly mild gaming, but mostly photo editing and heavy multitasking. The old P4 Northwood is showing age with Photoshop CS2 and trying to do something else at the same time.

With that said I plan on getting an E6300 for roughly a $400-$450 budget. I would need the Mobo, RAM & CPU. I'm looking at the ASUS P5B-VM and GeIL 1GB Dual Channel DDR2-800 1.8v 5-5-5-15. From what I've read everything will work just dandy, but I'm also looking to the future. Is the 965G chipset going to be upgradable to a Quad Core in the future or is there another chipset I should be looking at? Open to any suggestions. I would like onboard vid until I can get the money to buy a decent PCIe card later.

 

[evilr00t]

If you're going to get DDR2-800, you ought not to get the 965G. The E6300 can't take advantage of anything faster than DDR2-533 at stock.

Don't get the 965G if you intend to overclock at all... and for a E6300, that would be a great overclocking chip. You could stick an el cheapo http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814130005 vid card in there for now, and use it for a second display later if you got a powerful graphics card.

That said, if you aren't going to overclock, the G965 is the way to go. But save a bit on the RAM by gettting some DDR2-533/667(almost same price)

 

[atp777]

No need to overclock. May upgrade the board at a later date when the funds support it. Thanks for the advice. Now I can save some $$$ on the RAM.

In fact, I just reconfigured the list and with a 965P it saves me $25 if I use 512MB in Dual Channel vs 1GB Dual Channel on the 965G, but with the capabilites of the 965P I think I can handle 512MB for now. Any other takers on this?

 

[TSIMonster]

Have you thought about the ASRockVSTA board? Will allow you to keep using your DDR400 and save some buchs if money is real tight. Shoot, I think it even has an AGP slot for your 9800! that would save you lots of $$$ and allow you to still get the benifit from C2D

 

[theboomboomcars]

Photoshop likes ram so get as much as you can, Hard drives are slow so if you start swapping the extra core isn't going to help much.