Although the E8400 chips are having temperature problems and the Q9450 is yet to be released, 'Biscuit' and myself believe if we leave upgrading any longer, our old S939 gear isn't going to be worth anything. So after much pondering we've come up with the following shopping list:
- Intel Core 2 Duo E4500 ~ £77.19
We were originally looking at E2 chips but decided 1MB cache just wasn't acceptable. 3GHz+ should be easily achievable and with the same cache as our Opterons (2MB) we feel it'd be a decent upgrade and a worthy stop-go on our route to quad-core awesomeness.
- Abit IP35-E ~ £60.15 <-- Biscuit
- Abit IP-35 Pro ~ £112.44 <-- Me
After having an AN8 Ultra for a good few years, I'm a bit of a uGuru whore. :p We know the Abit IP35 boards are solid and will host a quad nicely when the time comes.
- 2GB OCZ PC2-6400C4 Platinum Rev. 2 XTC ~ £30.50 <-- Biscuit
- 2GB Corsair TwinX XMS2 PC2-6400 CAS4 ~ £37.18 <-- Me
Biscuit already snapped up the OCZ stuff when it was on offer a few weeks ago and as I'll be shopping at Scan HQ the Corsair is my obvious choice. I had been considering 4GB kits but from what I've read most applications don't even use 2GB, I could be wrong though... ? I'd also been looking into PC2-8500 memory as the Q9450 only has a 8x multiplier, but from what I've read either of the above can be dropped to CAS5 and overclocked to those levels anyway.
So basically we just want everyone's feedback and comments, are we doing the right thing?
Thanks as always folks!