I'm trying to decide whether to go the whole hog and upgrade the main internals of my PC, or whether to just patch it up with a new motherboard and keep running for a while.
What seems to have happened is that the memory controller on my board has partially packed up, depriving me of Dual-Channel mode for my 800Mhz DDR2 RAM. The RAM works fine in single channel mode.
Option 1 is say something like this:
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MB-220-GI&tool=3
Option 2 is to replace the motherboard, CPU, cooler and RAM, totalling around £230-250 even for moderately priced parts and a lowish i3 CPU.
Part of the question is that I have a nice new shiny GTX460, which I'm sure is being bottlenecked somewhat by my existing system, and especially now that its down to single channel RAM.
Can anyone shed any light on how much I'm currently crippling my system by only having single channel RAM? Or what benefits I'd likely get from going to an i3 over C2D?
Just seems an awful lot of money for not a significant performance increase, and I cant justify spending loads on an i7 right now.
What seems to have happened is that the memory controller on my board has partially packed up, depriving me of Dual-Channel mode for my 800Mhz DDR2 RAM. The RAM works fine in single channel mode.
Option 1 is say something like this:
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MB-220-GI&tool=3
Option 2 is to replace the motherboard, CPU, cooler and RAM, totalling around £230-250 even for moderately priced parts and a lowish i3 CPU.
Part of the question is that I have a nice new shiny GTX460, which I'm sure is being bottlenecked somewhat by my existing system, and especially now that its down to single channel RAM.
Can anyone shed any light on how much I'm currently crippling my system by only having single channel RAM? Or what benefits I'd likely get from going to an i3 over C2D?
Just seems an awful lot of money for not a significant performance increase, and I cant justify spending loads on an i7 right now.
