Buy a Core 2 Duo now, or what for quad?

The quad's going to be really expensive. $500+, as you said, which is a dealbreaker.
Do NOT get the E6700, that's just handing Intel money that you could have saved (~$200). Instead, get the E6600 and overclock it to E6700 speeds or higher.

Bah...my mistake. I meant the E6600.

Good enough. Need to match a mobo and memory.

These things OC well? Im already drooling.

Anyone want to volunteer a good mobo for this chip that I can OC with?
I was also going to pair it up with some corsair memory, 2 x 1gb, 4-4-4-12 timing or 5-5-5-12....

Highest to lowest price: P5W-DH, P5b Deluxe (Wifi or non-Wifi), P5B-E^, Gigabyte 965P-DS3, Gigabyte 965P-S3*

* = best bang for buck
^ = best features for buck

Appreciate it.

BTW, the rig in your sig is sick man...what kind of FPS do you get on that beast?

I should ask to:

Does AMD have anything in the pipeline to overtake C2D?

Do we have any info on how well a E6600 will run on Vista? Thats the next upgrade OS wise for me.

There is nothing in the pipeline as of now. The 4 x 4 platform is still iffy on performance and price, not to mention it needs 2 procs, so we're discounting it as of now.

E6600 will run just fine on Vista, probably how XP runs on your comp now. Vista is decently graphics intensive also though, so if you have a really old graphics card, might be sluggish, but most people shouldn't worry.

Mobo depends on what your looking for. P5W-DH is the premire 975 mobo, but the AW9-Max is nice also, with support for SLI and Xfire. MSI Plantinum Power Up is a good choice also. But there will be new mobo's out soon, such as the XBX2 and others... P5B, AB9Pro, and DS3 are all decent mobo's for single graphics card solutions.

No need for Corsair memory since it's expensive. G. Skill works fine, OCZ is nice also. Only get Corsair if its same price or cheaper, otherwise you have no need.

Appreciate the follow up.

As far as mobo, just need something that will work, allow me to OC. I will only have a x1900xt, SATA Driver, burner and xtrememusic sound card. I was looking at the suggested gigabyte board above. Don't need wireless, wiki, blah and blah...

Compared G.Skill and Corsair. Newegg is having a deal about now after a rebate. Corsair is about $5 more after the rebate.

Memory compare

To the OP: The boards mentioned are all good, the Gigabyte DS3 is probably what you want if you are looking to stretch your cash and won't be pushing too hard for OC (but it does a decent job I understand). Top spec boards I see most touted are the ASUS P5W-DH and the P5B, and the Abit AW9D-MAX. Have a look at some review and the spec and see what suits your needs - you haven't told us yet what you are planning to do with your new build.



Gah! I have to learn to prooof my posts.

Thanks for your reply and info. Much appreciated.

here is a comparrison chart I put up:

Motherboards

There quite a few P5B boards. My question is, what is the difference between:

Intel G965
and
Intel P965

Major differences?

EDIT: This board looks pretty good. Don't need RAID at all.

Asus P5B

While im at it, I'll throw out one more question:

If you knew now the capabilities of the E6600 and the E6400 and you wanted to build a top notch, extremely good gaming rig, which would you choose?

The E6400 is clocked slightly lower and has a 2mb cache instead of 4mb, but i've read that it OC's extremely well, into the 3.0gz range.

Would it be worthwhile going the extra mile and getting the E6600 at 2.4ghz and 4mb cache?

OR...

Should I save some money and get the E6400 and OC to 2.8ghz or so?

Forgive me for going at this one first, as this is an issue I had to wrestle with myself. The E6400 is a very good processor, and is cheaper than the E6600 by a good £60 (I'm in the UK). For gaming, the real bottleneck comes (assuming you have at least 1GB RAM) not at the processor but at the GPU - your graphics card. You would probably be better off getting the E6400 and OC'ing it (assuming you are comfortable with doing that, see below) and using the money you saved for a better GPU. All that said, I went for the E6600.

Why?

1. Because it's the cheapest 'proper' Conroe (instead of Allendale) and so has the 4MB cache which will come in handy for lots of things and keep my CPU serviceable* longer and will be usefull in non-gaming processor-intensive applications, like encoding.
2. I'm new to overclocking, and the extra power inherent in the core will make up for a lot of my own technical failings and feeble OCs until I get some skills together.
3. I have the money to spend.



*By serviceable, I mean that I won't need to upgrade as soon. This is only my theory, who knows what the future will hold.


As for the mobo, you have it all laid out in the comparison. Think of the features you will be using and tehone you might be using until you are going to get a new motherboard (for many people this is around a 2-3 year horizon). Go with the P965 or 975x chipsets whatever you choose as they are the more recent and/or developed main Intel chipsets.

I'd say the cache would only matter more, in what you use your PC for.

I think the CPU charts:

CPU Charts

would better help give you an idea.

Edit:

Taking into consideration on benchmarks that are more CPU intensive apps, not the games.

The P5B Basic is simply outclassed by the Gigabyte 965P-DS3, and horribly outclassed by the 965P-S3. From what I read in the motherboard forum, the P5B Basic doesn't OC well... the memory voltage is limited to 2.1V, keeping all but the best RAM from reaching high speeds.

The 965P-S3, which I have firsthand experience, overclocked flawlessly to a whopping 421FSB with a E6300, with a Vcore of 1.1625V.

If I were you, I would go with E6300 or 6400. But E6400 has been proven to be OC'ed well, you could go to the following link.

http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/10/10/cheap_thrills/pa...


If their rig fit you budget, might as well built with same or similar parts.

Crap, I didn't answer your question:


G965 has the shittacular integrated GMA X3000 graphics. It also has some kind of chipset speed lock. Most people are unable to get over 340MHz FSB with the G965 chipset.

The P965 is the same as the G965, except no integrated graphics and clock speed lock. This chipset has reached 500Mhz+ FSB before.

Wow, that is pretty impressive.

So if that OC's that well, how well does the E6600 OC?

I would not consider myself an extreme overclocker, but to get those results seems extreme.

Or can you get really good results by not being extreme? Basically, i don't want to watercool.  

I read an article that showed the Gigabyte boards really OC well with the E6300 and E6400.

Solid boards. I wonder if i could find a article on OC the E6600, just for comparison.

Granted, when looking for a motherboard, things I don't need are:

SLI
Crossfire
RAID

Will have one DVD drive, 1-2 SATA drives and a floppy. That is it.
That should narrow things down considerably. Just need to find the board.

It's not really extreme. I you see the set up, they used ctock heatsink and if you a better *air cooling* heatsink, it will gain 500MHZ more.

Stock HS reached 3.10Ghz
Zalman HS reached 3.15Ghz

This shows that it's very easy to OC and the OEM HS does a good job.


Of course, they also tried it with watercooled to go higher.

E6600 overclocks:
http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=2822&p=4

Not only the quads’ price will be a deal breaker, but it will be for quite some time a very specialized processor, indicated to very specific needs.