Some upgrade questions

Time for an upgrade and now seems like a good time. I was going to stick to AMD but the intel route seems too good to resist:

Intel Conroe Core 2 Duo E6600
Asus P5W DH Deluxe
Corsair 2GB DDR2 XMS2-8500C5
BFG GeForce 7600 GS OC

I was orginally going to get a 7950 GX2, but thought I would wait a year and get a DX10 card when they came out, so the 7600 is jus to tie me over till then really. I then splurged the money on some better ram instead. I guess the same thinking could be applied to the other components but I would like to invest in something that will last as long as my old system has and to me a DX10 card would help that. Any thoughts on this would be appreciated. Should I consider a 7900 GT instead?

Also, with the ram i'm unsure of the performance difference between the 8500c5 and Corsair 2GB DDR2 XMS2-6400C3? Both are almost the same price

Thanks for any comments

The benefit of faster memory on conroe processors is incredibly tiny. You're throwing money away by buying expensive RAM.

For some benchmarks showing just how little difference it makes look here or here or here: "This means performance of this group[Value DDR2 RAM] is almost exactly the same at DDR2-800 or DDR2-667 as the High-Performance DDR2 - at less than half the price!" Conroe runs RAM at DD2-667 by default.

The only reason to buy expensive RAM is if you're going to be heavily overclocking the FSB, otherwise you won't see any benefit from PC8500 RAM whatsoever.

I'd buy the cheaper ram and spend the difference on a 7900/X1900

get a decent ddr2-800 ram will be more than enough..

I would rather buy 4G of cheap ram instead of 2GB high-end ram.

Thanks for the reply. I'll get some Mushkin DDR2 800 instead and use the money saved for a 7900gt

Do you know if intel nvidia mobos will be out over the august period?