Mobo and CPU upgrade. Intel?

xander_uk2

xander_uk2

xander_uk2

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Joined
2 Dec 2003
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Inverness Scotland
Hi folks,

I've been a bit of an AMD fanboy these past few years. In fact, I've never owned an Intel CPU...Currently I'm running a San Diego 3700 @ 2.69Ghz on a MSI K8N Neo4 motherboard (939)

I've been looking at Dual Core setups recently and really like the sound of the Core 2 Duo chips. I've been told by one of my more informed mates that they leave the AM2 x2 chips behind when it comes to Gaming.

My question is, which one of the Core 2 Duo chips would give me a noticable performance increase over my current setup, and also what is a decent intel motherboard to pair it with? Budget is about 200 for the two, no i'm not after the best of the beast by any means.

Thanks!
 
I presume your running DDR RAM, in which case you'll need to buy some new DDR2 RAM to run on the new Motherboard. DDR2 is not backwards compatible with DDR so it seems a new CPU/Mobo/RAM combination is in order. Working with your original budget of £200, you could get this:

Gigabyte GA_P35_DS3R (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard
(£91.64) £77.99

Crucial Ballistix 2GB (2x1GB) DDR2 PC2-5300C3 667MHz Dual Channel Kit
(£64.61) £54.99

Intel Core 2 Duo E2140 "LGA775 Conroe" 1.60GHz (800FSB) - Retail
(£46.99) £39.99

Sub Total : £172.97
Shipping : £8.25
VAT : £31.71
Total : £212.93

It's a little over budget but worth it. ;)
 
Thanks for the replies :)

I should have mentioned that I already have the DDR2 RAM taken care of, so the 200 is for the mobo and CPU only
 
fastwunz said:
except that conroe is utter pants. (when compared to the rest)

so can you push your budget further perhaps?
Click to expand...

'Utter Pants' - I don't think so. When overclocked to 3GHz it will perform very nearly as well as the more expensive E6600. Have a look here for proof.
 
xander_uk2 said:
Thanks for the replies :)

I should have mentioned that I already have the DDR2 RAM taken care of, so the 200 is for the mobo and CPU only
Click to expand...

Well in that case, you could go for this:

Gigabyte GA_P35_DS3R (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard
(£91.64) £77.99

Intel Core 2 Duo E6550 "LGA775 Conroe" 2.33GHz (1333FSB) - Retail
(£111.61) £94.99

Sub Total : £172.98
Shipping : £8.25
VAT : £31.72
Total : £212.95

Depending on when you want to order, you could wait for the Gigabyte GA_P35C_DS3R to come into stock and order that for an extra £2. The difference between the two being that the slightly more expensive board supports DDR3 as well as DDR2.
 
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