Was thinking about replacing my Q6600 with something a bit more energy efficient whilst still keeping the performance in folding and other apps, was thinking about going for a phenom x4 to start with and upgrading in the future to an x6 or piledriver fx based cpu, I have looked about abit and have seen that a decent AM3+ mobo isn't that expensive, nor is DDR3, but I would like to know which phenom processor would give me a reasonable performance boost, I am running a water loop and do intend to over clock the chip, so if there are any that are known to be bad overclockers I can discount them.
Anyway my idea was to get this gigabyte mobo:
http://www.scan.co.uk/products/gigab...e-20-(x16)-atx
And either 1600 or 1866mhz ram:
http://www.scan.co.uk/products/8gb-(...9-9-24-xmp-15v
http://www.scan.co.uk/products/8gb-(...-9-27-xmp-150v
Would I see much improvement going with 1866 ram, or would it just get me a bit more headroom when overclocking?
Also as a side note, how much could I reasonably ask for my current setup, I have a G0 Q6600 that can clock to 3.6* at least when I had 2 sticks of ram, it won't get much past 3.3 with all 4 slots though, a gigabyte GA-X48-DS5 and 2x 1gb Giel PC2-6400 ram and 2x 2gb Kingstone PC2-6400 ram?
*(max I ever got was 3.8ish but the power draw at that level is immense it uses almost 150w more at the wall for an extra 200mhz due to the large voltage increase needed to run past 3.6)