New build almost complete, but a couple of questions

[obiwan05]

Well I finally bit the bullet and started my new C2D build.

Place my order Friday for the following (they arrive this am!):

EVGA 680i motherboard
EVGA 7900 GS (on sale, plus rebate makes big difference to ati 1950)
Corsair Dominator XMS2-6400 2x1GB

Going to run out at lunch and grab the cpu, which right now is expected to be a E6400. Already blew my budget (and then some!) so the E6600 is out of the question for now. Looked at the E6300 but the 6400 has a better multiplier which everyone recommends for overclocking.

My question(s) - how much better should I expect the E6400 to perform over my current X2 4400+ (939, retiring to 'server' work) setup? Assume same video card and ram amount... mostly do picture editing in Photoshop and video editing/muxing (many apps) but finally got Oblivion to play a little on! (yes, I know Oblivion will kill either system if I enable too much eye candy!).

Any ideas? I figure I'm gong to overclock the e6400 as much as I can with stock cooling (for now anyways)

Thanks for any comments!

 

[shadowduck]

Compare on Tom's CPU chart in many different benchmarks.

 

[k2gremlin]

actually Oblivion shouldnt be to bad.. the 7900 should be able to push a very large ammount of eye candy..