Alex UK said:
Yes, you'll see a huge improvement. Massive overclocking potential, and it will blow your old PC away. Enjoy.
complete and utter tosh. its this kind of thing that causes people to simply throw their cash away.
99% of games available are limited by gpu power alone, the res and framerate you play it is determined by your gpu. a x2 3800+ even at stock is more than enough to supply a 8800gtx in high res gaming and you would only see a difference in framerate(as in more than 2-3% difference) if you were playing at a lower res than your gpu is capable of, but at that point, you shouldn't have paid for a 8800gtx if you're playing below its res.
i can't name a single game where you can be CPu limited AND high framerates are needed. the few games that are cpu limited, sup commanded, couple of other RTS's and a couple of flight sims simply aren't 60fps needing games. they are slow and anything above 20fps is fine for those. they are essentially huge database games(rts's) running mulitple physics modules for all the units all the time and all the trajectorys of weapons and so on, damage models and thats why they run slower. but as rts's graphically aren't challenging and don't move fast at all its completely unimportant. also a x2 3800+ is more than enough to get decent framerates on those games also.
while 3dmark and stuff might get a boost, thats because they test the cpu and score it better if its faster.
windows shouldn't really feel any better, windows works well on a single core really, gaming feels better on a dual core because the few bits in background can be offloaded but you have that already. there is NO DOUBT a conroe is a much better cpu, it IS faster clock for clock and they do clock higher more easily, but 99.9% of users simply don't do anything intensive with their cpu's. gaming is allllll gpu, encoding almost no one does. WMP will use 5% of a conroe or 8% of a x2 3800+, high def will use 25% on a conroe and 40% on a x2. firefox will use 5% of either.
you can also get £60 am2 cpu's now that use a decent amount less power than conroe's, and still hit 3Ghz, possibly more, those are insanely cost effective cpu's, and probably hit 3Ghz and be faster than the low end conroe's. because getting a low end 6/7 multiplier conroe beyond 3Ghz isn't very easy at all.
my advice, don't upgrade till the new amd stuff comes out at the very least so you can see which is better, get some price competition going between the companies and choose a cost effective path should you need to upgrade. but if gaming is what you do most, then put the money to far better use on a higher end gfx card when newer games come out.
EDIT:- your kits worth honestly, very little now and won't drop in value a huge amount in the next 6 months. but its perfectly good kit.
ddr2 prices shouldn't go up much, and the difference between ddr3/ddr2 won't be huge for a long time. even if it was massively faster, a £55 crucial 2gig ddr2 kit will still only be 3-4% slower than the best fsb with the best ddr3.
spend money on graphics, then, if games start to require better cpu's look to upgrade the rest then.
upgrading now or soon to a conroe board and you might be mighty peeved as a quad core K10 is almost certainly going to be faster than a kentsfield or penryn. the only question is cost, £160-170 for a quad core Q6600 is going to be a killer price. but i'm not sure how many will be available, sounds like a getting rid of old stock before penryn is out type of tactic. you never know though.
(maybe lower end cpu, on e of the 2*** series)
