I'm facing a dilemma here. Should I buy the Intel E6320 or the E6420 cpu? I know about the x7 and x8 multiplier difference, but, really, how much will the difference be when overclocking? Is it worth the extra money for the e6420? Since both cpu's can be oc'ed to really high levels anyway. Plus, since I haven't done any overclocking since I oc'ed my amd barton quite a while ago, I was wondering: Is it worth the extra dough, to get 1066 memory instead of traditional 800? (always, in conjuction with the above cpu's). I'm thinking of getting 2*1Gb of it. And last, but not least, what should I look for, when choosing the mobo? I've heard about the 500 fsb "wall" etc. but.. errr.. don't really know what I should be looking for on the mobo specs. Any help? Thanks!

The faster the RAM, the better, I just completed some benchmarks last night for DDR2-3200(400), DDR2-4200(533), and DDR2-5300(667). I will be making a separate post with the screen shots. I can tell you that it will make no difference in out right processing power(duh) but the bandwidth jump in memory performance is well worth it. I saw a jump of around 800-1000mb's a sec. Every time I upped the memory speed, 3Dmark only went up a few points each time. I will also be doing FPS benchmarks tonight as well. There were no negative side effects observed when going past the 266mhz bus speed of the 1.86 core2 duo I was using(RAM speeds going from 200 to 266 to 333). Simply increases in frame rate, and bandwidth. In my opinion, if you can afford it, you should buy the fastest RAM available. I'm also tempted to break out the SLI Voodoo2 cards and see how they perform :p Core2 Duo 1.86 1GB DDR2 667 Nvidia 8500GT Asus P5L-MX

oh and 500mhz wall??? Never heard of this. The fastest Core2 Duo spec is 333.3mhz bus speed(1333mhz) and I would be surprised to see a chipset that could support 500mhz, a good surprise that is. Core2 Duo 1.86 1GB DDR2 667 Nvidia 8500GT Asus P5L-MX

"....and I would be surprised to see a chipset that could support 500mhz, a good surprise that is." "A look at the overclocking results shows that Asus reached the highest FSB speed of 500 MHz without sophisticated cooling or long-winded fine tuning. DFI is close behind at 490 MHz and Foxconn maxes out at 450 MHz. These results mean that these motherboards allow you to overclock most processors to their maximum limit, but an extra margin never hurts, either." http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/10... There are already a handful of enthusiasts with P35 boards out there doing 500MHz FSB (2GHz effective) without deploying extreme cooling measures ;-)