Hi,

I have decided that its time to upgrade my pc, at the moment I am running a P4 2.8 with a Asrock P4VM800 MB.

I am looking at the E6300 – E6600 Processor's and wondering which MB would be a good match, ive seen the Asrock 775Dual-880Pro and wonder for the cash is this a good one to consider??

I would like to spend upto £300 for the Processor and MB so help needed please…..

Cheers Dave

Also what would the best MB chip set be to run the E series processors???

If this system is going to be for gaming or overclocking you can't go with with an nVidia chipset series especially the nForce 6 series coming out soon.

AMD Athlon 64 X2 4600+ OC 2.7ghz
2GB Dual Channel DDR 3200
Nvidia 7900GT
SATA II 2x 300gig 7200rpm 16mb cache RAID-0
Gigabyte Nforce 4 SLI

Hi,

My system will be used for some work, i.e. Excel Word VBA etc and surfing but a part will also be gaming use

Ive been on Intel’s website and according to them the E series seem to use these chip sets:
Intel® 975X Express Chipset
Intel® P965 Express Chipset
Intel® 946PL Express Chipset
Intel® 946GZ Express Chipset
Intel® Q965 Express chipset
Intel® Q963 Express chipset
Intel® G965 Express chipset

So with that in mind Ive now been looking at these MoBo’s:
Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3
MSI 975X

Be aware that the board & CPU isn't gonna complete this upgrade. You're also gonna need DDR2 RAM, a PCI-E video card, & quite possibly, a new power supply.

What is it that your current setup isn't capable of doing?

Ive been looking at DDR2 and a new PCI card to go along with the new setup, at the mo I am at the deciding what to buy stage.

The current system is just a bit slow and I would like to be more upto date as ive had this setup for approx 2 years now, also I recently purchased Gothic 3 and the system seemed to drag its heals.

Also I am now wondering is it worth spending the extra money for a E6600 rather than the E6400??

From what ive been reading most articles are saying that most app's & games won’t use more than the 2mb L2 cache let alone 4mb.

More decisions.......

Picking a Conroe IMO is pretty cut & dried because of how easy it is to overclock those chips - so forget the E6400. Look at it as a choice between an E6300 and the E6600 and it would be a lot easier for you to decide what path to take.

The E6600 is a budget mans Core 2 Duo extreme edition and what I mean by that is it uses the same amount of cache as an Core 2 Duo extreme edition and you can overclock it to that of a Core 2 Duo extreme edition or even higher.

If it was up to me i'd wait and see what the quard core will fair, they are just around the corner and Intel is producing a budget quad core processor around the same price as the E6600.

AMD Athlon 64 X2 4600+ OC 2.7ghz
2GB Dual Channel DDR 3200
Nvidia 7900GT
SATA II 2x 300gig 7200rpm 16mb cache RAID-0
Gigabyte Nforce 4 SLI