About to Upgrade: Core 2 Duo or 64x2?

[cocksy_boy]

yeah - thats a good point. I wouder how picky the ds3 motherboard is in terms or matched dimms for dual channel performaance - and how much difference will it make in performance?

[cocksy_boy]

OK Folks, how does this sound?:

1 LN15070 Gigabyte GA 965P-DS3 iP965, S775, PCI-E (x16), DDR2 533 / 667 / 800, SATA II, SATA RAID, ATX £80.50 £94.59

1 LN15070 Gigabyte GA 965P-DS3 iP965, S775, PCI-E (x16), DDR2 533 / 667 / 800, SATA II, SATA RAID, ATX

1 LN15047 Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 S775, 1.86Ghz, 1066Mhz FSB, Conroe Core, 2M Cache Retail £111.55 £131.07

1 LN11596 2Gb (2X1Gb) Corsair TwinX XMS2, DDR2 PC6400 (800), 240 Pin, Non-ECC Unbuffered, CAS 5-5-5-12 £124.49 £146.28

1 LN12975 512MB Sapphire Radeon X1900 XT PCI-E (x16) Mem 1450 MHz, GPU 625 MHz, 48 Pipes VIVO £183.89 £216.07

Net Total £500.43
Carriage: City Pack: All Day Delivery by 17:30 £5.98
V.A.T £88.62
TOTAL £595.03

Any thoughts on this setup? Cheers folks!

[chuckskull]

Well you listed the mobo twice, guessing thats a typo. but yeah that system will be blazingly fast

[cocksy_boy]

Arrgh! I'm looking at motherboards, and now I think I want the P5W DH Deluxe!! But, I may have to reduce the cost somewhere - I'm thinking about reducing to 1 gb ddr2 (2x512), and bung another 1gb stick in at later date when I have more money...

Prob gonna start with 1Gb (2X512Mb) Corsair TwinX TwinX, DDR2 PC6400 (800), 240 Pin, Non-ECC Unbuffered, CAS 4-4-4-12.

Does anyone reckon there will be any probs trying to get the dual channel working after I upgrade (with 1 gb stick in one channel, and 2x512 sticks in the other channel), and if it doesn't work in dual channel mode, is there really gonna be a large performance drop?

Cheers again!

[cocksy_boy]

Right,

I finally bit the bullet and went for this:

C2D E6300
Gigabyte DS3
2x1 GB Geil PC6400 (4-4-4-12)
Sapphire X1900 XT

Cost: £600 Inc VAT+ P&P - Can't wait for it to be delivered!

Cheers for you help,

Cocksy!

[cocksy_boy]

Hey Guys. Just building my new beast now - memory and grafix didn't arrive till today. Just a thought - would it be better to get hold of windows 64 and install that, or just stick with the xp pro 32 bit and wait for VISTA to come out fully? hadn't thought of that till now!! Cheers, laters

Cocksy.

[FInalD]

For the sake of finding derivers stick with WinXP 32bit even though it isn't built for use with Conroes and 64bit you will see an improvment on multitasking etc.
About 18months ago I changed from a 2.0Ghz Duron to a 2.0Ghz Althon 64bit and it was a vast improvment on multitasking etc. I use WinXP 32bit Home.

Hope that helps a bit.

FinalD

[FatalSaviour]

For the sake of finding derivers stick with WinXP 32bit even though it isn't built for use with Conroes and 64bit you will see an improvment on multitasking etc.
About 18months ago I changed from a 2.0Ghz Duron to a 2.0Ghz Althon 64bit and it was a vast improvment on multitasking etc. I use WinXP 32bit Home.

Hope that helps a bit.

FinalD

I'd second that...unless you're sure you don't have any printers/scanners etc that are missing drivers for x64, I'd hold off.

x64 was a nice idea, but (puts flame suit on) never really turned out too well.
Don't get me wrong, a lot of sites now list their x64 drivers, and I haven't used it for 6 months or so now, but it just turned out to be a lot more hassle than it should have been.

Hopefully, fingers crossed, Vista will change that, and give manufacturer's a kick up the backside to release some decent x64 drivers etc.

[shaithis]

I use X64 almost exclusively and have done since the betas....

Its nice, drivers are now almost standard with every peice of newish hardware, I'd say its a bit more stable then plain XP as well.

Not had any problems at all with it......YMMV tho

[EtheAv8r]

Does anyone reckon there will be any probs trying to get the dual channel working after I upgrade (with 1 gb stick in one channel, and 2x512 sticks in the other channel), and if it doesn't work in dual channel mode, is there really gonna be a large performance drop?

Cheers again!

Dual channel requires identical pairs - one in each channel - and dual channel does deliver performance improvements.

[cocksy_boy]

Right - cool, thanks for that. I'll just stick with pro 32 bit for now then, even though 64 does sound nice! I'll wait for VISTA to get sorted and make that the next stepping stone. Just got it all up & running, and trying to sort out a couple of conflicts before I start overclocking and posting some results. Cheers!