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Conroe or stick with what i have ?

If you have seemingley endless cash reserves(or are seriously in debt), want 90 fps vs 70 fps(not that the human eye can tell a difference or your brand new 23inch lcd monitor is likely to support it) and always have to have the latest thing regardless of the relevence to you, go for conroe.

I personally think you are fine with what you have unless you are the person I have described above.

I prefer to be a shrewd opportunist and it saves me a lot of money and I still have a system that runs every game i have at max settings for what my monitor(VP191S) can process and most importantly what my eyes can see.

A good check as to whether you need to upgrade is to set your graphics card to 800x600 in your most demanding game (so your GPU isn't limiting the rest of your machine) and if it drops to an unacceptable level (for me this is 50 - 60 fps but most would say lower) then your CPU is limiting you and its time to upgrade. i don't think that you would have this problem with any current games and this is only using one of your cores (quake4 with patch is the exception).

I also don't beleive that you will have this problem with next gen games either as I don't think the power of any dual core CPU has yet been tapped in this arena.

Conroe will be my next upgrade as and when i need it but is pretty pointless for me now.

Good luck with your decision.

Russty
 
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Windows won't be any faster really.As a 1ghz P3 will run xp fine with 1 gig of ram.

Its the gaming and the video phtoshop work thats shines,
 
Paramount said:
I used Windows defrag but nothing beats a nice clean install.
Click to expand...

Agreed. Especially after installing and testing plenty freeware programs. Another hobby of mine, but man can it destroy a windows install. :p
 
I agree with the defrag or windows re-install. I'm using O&O defrag at the moment which is much better than the windows one as it will defrag everything - even your page file.

http://www.oo-software.com/en/

With this, commonly accessed files are moved to the fastest part of your harddisk. It will also do this in the background - automatically gauging your system resources so as to not interfere with what you are doing(unlike windows defrag)

My windows runs very fast since using this and is always defragmented.

Russty
 
Personally im not sure id bother Humax.. it depends on how u use your rig.. if you do a lot of encoding audio/video then u will see a good improvement which will be worthwhile... With you already having a dual core cpu its not like your going to notice much more of an improvement in multi tasking. Also your CPU isnt a bottleneck with the 7600GT you have... down to u really and depends what you use your rig for :)
 
With a 7600 you'll probably be somewhat GPU limited. You'd probably gain a better gaming experience upgrading your GFX card than upgrading CPU/Mobo/Ram (that's assuming you dont upgrade the GPU when moving to conroe)
Windows wise (said this elsewhere afaik) there's very little difference. App's probs won't load much faster due to HDD speeds, any difference there is will be minimal. Hard pushed to notice the difference between this X2 rig, the Yonah rig or the Conroe. The yonah and conroe are running HEAVILY overclocked. Gaming you can see the difference, but thats really about it unless you're timing stuff...

Gaming you gain as long as the games you play arent currently GPU limited. Most will gain but that'll vary.

If your system does what you need it to do, theres no need to upgrade.
 
Thanks for the help so far guys .i should have said that im not in to gameing in a big way .but i have just got a new video camera so i was thinking more that way . thats the reason why i would keep the GT7600. just been looking at prices for the new kit
Gigabyte GA_965P_DS3 (£108.09
intel Core 2 DUO E6300 (£126.89---maybe the E6600
GeIL 2GB (2x1GB) PC5300 667MHz Value DDR2 Dual Channel Kit £152.74
Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro CPU (£21.14
so this works out at about £408.86

:eek: a fair bit of money .so how much would i get for my old kit when i sell it off ?

if i sell it now i might get a good price for it .if i wait i might get nothing for it in 6 months time .
 
Unless you run benchies all day, you'll probably notice windows apps are a little "snappier" and encoding is a lot quicker.. in gaming, you'll notice your framerates are higher IF you run summat like fraps, otherwise you won't notice. As said before, if you're going from and XP2500 or the like, you will notice a difference, but from A64 3500/3800, I reckon its not worth it.
I went from an A643700 san diego @ 2.6ghz, and I don't see any benefit whatsoever in windows or games unless I run fraps. BUT it does future proof to some degree and I sold my previous gear for a good price so costwise it it was worth it.
 
Does depend on circumstances... take my rig for example.. its crying out for another gig of ram (I like games) its an added bonus for me to go core 2 duo and just go for it with 2gig of ram. I like to multi task a lot, I often have at least 5 programs open at once.. going dual core id benefit from that coming from a single core cpu. I think it depends a lot on where your coming from and what you do with your rig. Also depends how hardcore you wanna be with wanting the latest parts :p .. could get some money back from your current rig...

Dunno if u have seen this before but take a look here to get a rough compare http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/cpu/charts.html
 
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