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My current system is:

Asus A8N SLI Deluxe MoBo (Skt 939)
Fx-55 Processor
2 Gig DDR 400 Ram
Geforce 7800GTX
2 IDE Hard Drives

I am considering an upgrade to either a Socket AM2 or a Core 2 Duo System. Regardless of which manufacturer I choose I'll need to upgrade my motherboard and RAM it seems.

I'm having a hard time choosing a CPU however. The X2 AMDs are very cheap, but do not offer the same kind of performance as the Core 2s.

Pricing:

X2 5000+ £110
E6400 £128
E6600 £175

The X2 5000+ and E6400 are both very close in performance and price. My understanding is that the E6400 makes for a much better overclocker. How do they compare in terms of energy efficiency and heat? While the E6600 seems very popular, I'm not sure it is worth the extra £47.

For motherboards I was considering a Asus M2N32-SLi-DLX nForce 590 SLi for an AMD system. I understand that the main advantage of an Intel 975X over 965P is that it supports better faster SLI, whereas the 965P supports faster DD2 memory. Is this correct?

I think that the E6400 would be the best option, does anyone have any experience with Abit/Asus/Gigabyte motherboards for Socket 775? If I'm going for a fast processor and say DDR2 800 ram I'd obviously need a motherboard that would be able to support such high speeds.

Any suggestions or advice would be very much appreciated.

Just FYI, sometime in like late July there are supposed to be price drops on intel processors. Something like the quad core 6600 cpu for 266, it might be worthwhile to wait a little longer. The FX-55 isn't exactly what I'd call a poor performer.

Why are you upgrading? That should still be a very strong system.

Although, if you're going to go ahead and upgrade, I might be interested in taking some of that DDR400 off your hands.

The core microarchitecture overclocks like mad. I've got mine running 25% above stock, with reduced voltages. Completely stable. The extra 47 pounds gets you another 2MB of L2 cache, which could be significant. If you're going for a lower end processor to overclock, I've heard the E4300 is actually much better (cheaper, higher multiplier)

My E6600 has a 33% overclock on it (to 3.2 GHz), and if I was to switch to water cooling, I know this chip would easily do a 50% overclock (to 3.6GHz; it will load Vista on aircooling, but it overheats too quickly to really do anything). The newer bins should get better overclocking results. Unlike Beowulf, my CPU required higher voltages, but it was an early bin.

Now, how serious are you about SLI? Are you serious enthusiast looking to get the best gaming performance and willing to spend the money needed to get all the right parts? Or do you want to use as an upgrade path? If you're doing former, the Asus nForce 650 board is probably the most stable of the SLI boards (while having excellent performance). For the best performance, you'd want to go with the EVGA 680 board, but the 680 boards aren't quite as stable (don't worry, you'll hardly ever have problems, due to BIOS updates and new board revs; I'm currently using an Asus Striker, BIOS 1002 with no issues). BTW, the 975x doesn't official support SLI; it supports ATI/AMD's Crossfire. You can get SLI to work on it with hacked Nvidia drivers, but I don't consider that to be a real option.

Now, if you're looking at a SLI as an upgrade option, DON'T. You're just pissing away money on a more expensive motherboard, and by the time you're ready to get your second, matching video card, there will be a new card on the market that will annihilate your SLI upgrade. In this case, I'd go with a 965 board. Intel based boards will be more stable than any nForce based board, as well.

Also, the Asus 975x board will support DDR2-800, but Intel considers that to be overclocking. I had no problem with that on the Asus P5W-DH.

For RAM, I'd recommend Corsair or G.Skill. I've used both. If you're going to use Vista and want to run it with 4GB of RAM, G.Skill has a nice 2x2GB kit (which I'm currently using).

The E4300 doesn't have VT technology if you care about virtualization (though there's VMWare for that- KVM for Linux using VT is quite flaky so I'm using VMware anyway, and Xen isn't for desktops). Not really an issue on a gaming rig.

Anyway, running my E6400 at a 50% overclock to 3.2GHz on air.
It's probably capable of more w/ current cooling and/or higher volts, but I'm keeping temps below 60C for safety (also, I'd have to overclock my RAM at that point too).

975X doesn't support SLI, it supports crossfire, unless you use hacked drivers.

Faster memory isn't really worth it unless overclocking.

Uraniun235 wrote:Why are you upgrading? That should still be a very strong system.

Although, if you're going to go ahead and upgrade, I might be interested in taking some of that DDR400 off your hands.

I've found that the Fx-55 is starting to struggle with the newer games, and I do a lot of 3D rendering work which could benifit from a switch to dual core. My windows is getting bloated, hard drives are full, and when I boot the system after my last powersupply died it doesnt display the first bios checks.

Switching from a Fx-55 to a E6600 suggests a 50%-100% increase in performance. I figure I may as well fix all these problems at once.

Maybe it would be better holding out till July, but my understanding is that the Conroe just underwent a price cut, are you saying theres going to be another? Also, if I were to always wait for the next price cut, I'll end up waiting forever.

I wouldn't consider SLI as an upgrade option, I've always found that upgrading to a newer card range offers similar or better performance, better support for new graphic standards and is less power hungry too.

How will my Nvidia card run on an intel system? They seem to support ATI cards better.

Uraniun235: If you want the ram that might be possible. I am considering combining the leftover parts from the upgrade with an old Geforce 6600GT to make a backup system however.

Thanks for your advice so far.

Acidburns wrote:How will my Nvidia card run on an intel system? They seem to support ATI cards better.

Nvidia cards run fine on Intel systems. The only "favor" Intel gave ATI was official crossfire support, and now that AMD bought ATI, you won't see that happen again. And for single card usage, you'll get the same (stock) performance out of Intel based motherboards that you would out of Nvidia based motherboards (even with bullshit like Linkboost - no game will saturate a 16x PCIe bus today, and that's not going to change anytime soon, and makes the 25% bus OC Linkboost gives you worthless; Linkboost causes stability problems more than anything else).

If you're looking for extra cores in order to better handle 3D rendering, I would think that waiting for the Q6600 to hit $266 in mid summer, its not a terribly long wait for what I would guess is a healthy performance boost (if your applications really benefit from multiple processors).

I just remembered that Intel has come out with the E6320 and E6420 chips which are clocked exactly the same as the E6300 and E6400, but have 2x the cache, and cost a couple bucks more. They should also overclock like mad.

I'll note I'm using an ASUS P5B Deluxe/WiFi-AP MB. Recommended.

If you can wait until summer for affordable quad core, that should benefit your rendering a lot. Otherwise, X2 5600+ is currently the best value even with the Core 2 price cuts. It's faster than an E6420 and cheaper than an E6600. The main advantage the Core 2's have is that they consume less power, but not by any huge margin. Also, AMD motherboards have historically been cheaper for the same quality than Intel ones, but I don't know whether that still holds up.