Planned Upgrade and a few questions!
Hi eveyone im new to these forums and still learning a lot about hardware and overclocking and the like, i recently made the grave error of purchasing an 8600gts due to lack of homework but am trying to make the best of it and making the rest of my PC futureproof for the new releases at winter.
As you can see in my system specs my mobo is a P5LD2-SE which i recently found out is not the newer revision which supports c2duo chips :x so anyway im looking to upgrade my mobo processor and some extra ram with a cooler to hopefully run an e4300 at a decent speed until the new 45nm processors are released (or keep this if they are no good :P) so here is what ive got planned.
MOBO
Gigabyte GA P35-DS3R -
PROCESSOR
Intel core 2 duo E4300 2mb cache 800mhz FSB -
RAM
GB (2x1GB) CorsairTwinX XMS2, DDR2 PC2-6400 (800) -
CPU COOLER
Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro -
THERMAL PASTE
Arctic Silver 5 Thermal Compound -
Total Price= 250 quid
So the questions, first of all i would like to know how on earth you judge a motherboard's overclocking potential simply from reading specs on retail sites, i know there are a lot of reviews out there but when there isnt one i am just lost, and the only real basis i work on is black pcb and big price= good overclocker O.o
Secondly how much of an overclock would i be looking at with that board and cooler, and will my 550w power supply handle everything nicely?
Thirdly after reading the guide here and a few others on overclocking, i am still completely dumbfounded by ram timings and i have no idea about what to change with them when overclocking and how much you should be changing, i also dont understand the 1:1 ratio bit, im not asking for an answer as its probably too much to ask but any extra links or information i could read would be very appreciated.
Finally, is there anything i could cut down on without affecting the quality too much, any drop in price is good news for me :D
Thats all for my first post here! Hope you can help and thanks!
(doh i cant post the URLS without 5 post count, sorry for the inconvinience)
