Upgrading from an old 939 with an fx55 and a 7800gt

I have at home a brand new 250g sata barracuda and an Diamond ati3870 512 ddr3
ps is 520 watt i believe

for under $400 - i need a Mobo CPU and Ram

I play mostly Wow and other MMORPG with an occasional fps

Was looking at a q6600 for $189 dunno which mobo or ram tho
or cheap cheap a x2 6000 for $114

will be an xp home machine for now

Q6600
GA-EP45-DS3L
2X1GB DDR2-800

Is WoW even still fun? At some point it just becomes like a rat race.

thanks akhilles my only concern with that mobo is it only has 8 reviews on newegg. Ive read the p45 is better so im all for it. Can someone recommend some decent ram. like 4 gigs for ~$100 or so. I know windows xp will only show 3.xx but I will be upgrading to vista one of these days. Is the stock cooler enough for the 6600q as i wont be oc'ing?

As for Wow im waiting on Warhammer online this fall

Oooh, a Diamond HD3870. That miserable POS card, plus lame tech support, broken web site, missing references to Diamond as a partner on ATI's web site (hence no support there either), etc. etc. earned Diamond a place on my permanent "Do not buy" list. To be fair, the fan-related problems I had affected many HD3870s, but the other issues made this card a mistake. I dropped back to an Asus EAH3850 and have had no problems. My primary game is Guild Wars, another MMORPG, which I believe is graphically more demanding than WoW. It looks good.

It isn't that WinXP only shows 3.2-3.5GB of RAM; 32-bit Vista will show the same. You need a 64-bit OS to see all of it.

i was replacing an evga 7800gt in april (card got a lot of gaming time was a great card). I was constantly getting nvd4.dll errors in Wow. I tried a bunch of remedies and ended up with the 3870 Diamond. It has worked flawlessly except they lost my rebate info. If i had known the 4850/4870 were coming out like 1 month later i might have waited. GRRRR

Can xp take advantage of the 4 cores of the q6600? I think im set on it and the Mobo. Just need Ram advice

thanks

My personal favorite on RAM is Mushkin. I don't think it's the fastest out there, but it just works, and will always work at the JEDEC default voltage which is 1.8v. It can be bumped up and overclocked, but I tend to prefer spending more time playing ON my PC than playing WITH it. Perhaps if I didn't work full time I'd have more patience for more tweaking.
I've also used G.Skill, Crucial, and Geil. Only the Crucial gave me trouble, but that's because it was 1066 and I was trying to use it on a couple of P35 boards.

I think Patriot Extreme Performance is on sale at a few places for less than $100, I've used it for a few systems (inc my own) and it's good. 4-4-4-12 timings, needs 2.1v or 2.2v for that (Which Patriot suggests).

I believe there's some Corsair 5-5-5-18 going for less than $100 as well. Won't notice a huge performance difference.

Also, consider OCing the Q6600 to 3.0ghz. That motherboard supports a native FSB of 333 so all you need to do in BIOS is up the Q6600's fsb from 266 to 333 and you're done. Should need to up the voltages or replace the stock heatsink. Google around for reviews/steps on this though for peace of mind if you like (for the record, I'd still recommend a Kingwin or Xigmatek ~$30 heatsink)

http://secure.newegg.com/WishList/ [...] 565dfc9004

looking for opinions on my wish list

right around $400 with rebates
this will be used with a 3870 and a 250 barracuda ata as well as a 520 watt ps

what do i need to do for windows xp to recognize the quad core? the i'll be using has service pack 2 installed on it

thanks for the help

That was a temporary wish list, and is empty.

You won't need to do anything special to get Windows to recognize your processor.