I decided to make a little PC upgrade. So came here to get an advice. All help will be appriciated. Sry for my noobishness in the thread =)
Im planning to purchase this processor "Intel Core 2 Duo E6600, 2.40 GHz, Socket 775, FSB 1066, 4MB Cache", so which motherboard would u suggest for it? Asus, Gigabyte any brand basicly.
Other requirements r:
- Well it has to fit in a Sapphire ATI Radeon X1900XT 512mb PCI-Express and have a slot for another graphics card, in case i decide to go for dual cards one day.
- Support for Zalman CNPS7700-Cu cooler
- 2 slots for 512mb DDR RAM memory
- Excellent cooling solution (just btw the reason why im upgrading is cuz of overheating with P4 560 (3.6 GHz) on motherboard Intel D915GAGL)
- Must fit inside Antec Sonata Piano Black 2 case.
- Not high / reasonable price, ofc the lower the better.
Also which RAM memory would u suggest for the new motherboard?
I recommend this mobo and this memory although I would look at newegg instead of TD. neweggs site must be down at the moment otherwise I would have linked directly to them.
regardless of what mobo you go with, I highly recommend removing the chipset heatsinks and reseating them with artic silver 5 prior to installing the mobo in the case. also remove any pretty covers over the heatsinks if they have them so they can breath. you can also install some chipset fans if you wish. 40mm x 40mm fans will fit perfectly on the P5W DH Deluxe chipset heatsinks. I lowered my mobo temp over 10 degrees C by performing these mods.
Personally, although upgrading is the cheap way to go, To get the most out of a high end processor like the one you want then your really going to have to spend a few bucks on a good motherboard and RAM. Like stepping up to at least DDR2 667MHz RAM (the one listed above would work nice). You may save a little money just by steping down on the processor a little and getting the Core2Duo E6400 2.13GHz and overclocking (making sure first the motherboard and memory you get is able to do it) the system a little to jump it up to 2.66 (which is very possible with the right amount of system cooling and a small volt increase in the BIOS)
Persoanlly right now i have my 2.13 running at a very stable 2.4GHz per core, and for a lot less then the E6400 costs. (E6400= $218, E6600= $308 depending on where you shop) Plus a little more expensive motherboard like an MSI 975X Platinum Power Up Edition would give a room for future upgrades. It is also crossfire capable like the one listed above, can handle more RAM , More SATA slots, and extra IDE slot, and has support for the next generation quad-core processors in the future.
