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Upgrading to E6600 system, advice appreciated

T

termac50

Member
My local store has the E6400 for $249, and the E6600 for $269 Going with the latter. My current system does OK, but my motherboard has been crashing randomly at boot, showing the "checking nvram" error with no rhyme or reason, so it's time to upgrade.

Current system:

Amd 3500+
Asus A8V mobo
4 512mb sticks of mushkin pc3500, 184pin
Ati x800xl 256mb video card (agp version)
Dell 2005fpw monitor
X-Fi platinum sound card
Thermaltake 480w P.S.

The computer will be on at least 16 hrs a day, must be rock solid and reliable.

1. Overclocking ok in the long haul? I'd like to squeeze 2 years outta this baby if possible. I had the good ole Celery300 oc'd to 450 back in the golden era, and it refused to o/c after the 1st year. Haven't bothered to o/c since🙁

2. What mobo is recommended for overclocking?

3. Is my ram now obsolete?

4. I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess my video card is incompatible. Need a PCI-E replacement that'll let me play Oblivion and other games @ 1680x1050 or 1600x1200 with a lil' eye candy, with reasonable fps. Image quality for desktop apps is a bigger concern though.

Thanks again🙂
 
You can do what I did, and get a ASROCK 775DUAL VSTA motherboard. It is a great upgrade board because it has AGP 8X, PCI-E 4x, and can use DDR or DDR2 memory. Plus it runs Core 2 Duo out of the box.
I just bought an E6600 and this board from newegg, the board was only $59. It works great. It is very stable, and even slightly overclockable. I currently have my E6600 running at 2.7 with 300 MHZ fsb with 2 GB DDR 2 memory.

WHen I purchased it, I just plugged my old PC2700 memory in, my x850xt AGP video card, and booted up. it works great for the price, then, when you get more money, you can upgrade to DDR2, and PCI-E video card (the 4x is only like a 3-5% hinderance in performance)

Tomshardware did a review of this board a while ago, you might want to check it out.


After looking at your system specs, we almost have the same rigs. I have the X-FI as well, but I only had 2x512 mb of ram. This board maxes out at 2 GB of ram with 2 slots for DDR and 2 slots for DDR2 (can't mix and match). I have the same monitor as well. My x850xt allows me to play at those resolutions with a lot of eye candy turned on.
 
Hi. Thanks for the response about the asrock 775dual. Few more questions:


1. I've always wondered if I go w/ the E6600 and keep the same video card, how much better will games run? Slightly, or huge? The usual response I see to this question is upgrade the video card if you wanna play games, the processor is not a big factor, etc.

2. My neighbor offered to trade me his 7600gs 256mb pci-e card for some of my dvd collection. Is that and the X800xl about the same? If so, I guess I could just get a straight up 775 board and just buy a gig of ram.

Thx again.
 
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