Building a 'high end' core 2 duo/quad pc?

md99

md99

md99

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13 Aug 2007
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Oirland
Hi all, I'm putting together a hand-me-down pc for a family member who'll use it for mainly entertainment purposes but with the odd bit of gaming too (emulation mostly).

Anyway I thought it might be fun to build a rig as powerful as possible but constrained by the mainboard and gpu in it.

There is an asus p5q lga775 mainboard and a radeon 5850 gpu in the case. That just leaves me in the hunt for the best compatible ram and cpu that money could buy at the time which may be available at drastically lower costs today.

Any suggestions? I'm crap at this kind of thing.

Mainboard specs: https://icecat.biz/en/p/asus/p5q+pro/motherboards-p5q+pro-1598243.html
 
Officially the fastest LGA775 CPU would be the Core 2 Extreme 9770, but the LGA 771 Xeon X3492 is actually faster and can be pin modded to fit LGA 775 boards by using a simple sticker on the CPU and a scalpel blade on the socket itself.

You may need a modded BIOS to support the Xeon however.
 
CPU - Q9650 is probably the best bet for non overclocking, 3.0ghz quad core. Or, if overclocking is going to be done, Q6600, 2.4hgz quad core and known for overclocking well.

Ram - Just get the fastest DDR2 set you can find. Crucial has always done me well. 8gb should be fine. 16gb might be a touch costly in DDR2.
 
I really like the socket LGA775 boards I find they make excellent retro PC's provided they have the IDE headers and floppy header on the boards. I did a Windows 98 build recently with a socket 775 gigabyte board and 420 Intel Celeron 1.6 GHz FSB 800 MHz processor. DDR2 512MB RAM even with the onboard graphics and audio it performs very well.

I also did a Windows 2000 build from a AM2 board Dual Core 2 Duo 4 GB Ram anthlon64 all motherboard drivers installed. All inside a mid 90s beige PC case. I was amazed at what retro games I could play on that.

There are plenty of options out there, do some research watch youtube videos for tips.
 
I've just inherited a s775 bundle as well...
It's got a Q9550s with a p5q pro turbo and 2x2gb sticks of ddr2 1066 ram

I'm adding another 2 sticks to make 8gb and chucking in a 750ti
As the CPU is an 's' version, it's baseline tdp is 65w and should hopefully be an easier overclock than the standard q9550
And of course pairing it with a cheap SSD
(So not quite a retro build after all lol)
 
Still running a q6600 as our photo backup thingy, was at 3.6 for ages but dropped it to 3.2 to run it cooler.

Wouldn’t mind a little project with it, what sort of things can be done?
 
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