Quick upgrade check please

Pho

Pho

Pho

Soldato
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
9,336
Location
Derbyshire
I'm about to do a 'budget' upgrade to my PC. I already have the rest of the components including a decent enough PSU (OCZ StealthXStream 600w).
I'm making the switch from AMD to Intel and as I haven't been following Intel for years I'm not sure what's decent. Through researching around the web I've come up with:

Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 2.66GHz 1333FSB Socket 775 4MB Retail
Gigabyte GA-P35C-DS3R
Corsair 2GB Kit (2x1GB) DDR2 800MHz/PC2-6400 XMS2 Memory Non-ECC Unbuffered CL4(4-4-4-12) E.P.P. (TWIN2X2048-6400C4)
Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro
Total: £255.12

I'm fairly sure I will be overclocking it, but probably not straight away so I may hold off on the Freezer 7. Other than that, is everything else ok?

Thanks :)
 
unless you need the extra cache on the e6750, below is what i would get

Your basket
Product Name Qty Price Line Total
Corsair 2GB DDR2 XMS2-6400C4 TwinX (2x1GB) £32.99
(£38.76) £32.99
(£38.76)
Thermalright Ultra-120 Extreme CPU Cooler (Socket AM2/LGA775) £34.99
(£41.11) £34.99
(£41.11)
Intel Core 2 Duo E2180 "LGA775 Conroe" 2.00GHz (800FSB) - Retail £46.99
(£55.21) £46.99
(£55.21)
Abit IP35 (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard £69.99
(£82.24) £69.99
(£82.24)
Sharkoon Silent Eagle 2000 120mm Fan - 3/4 Pin £6.99
(£8.21) £6.99
(£8.21)
Sub Total : £191.95
Shipping cost assumes delivery to UK Mainland with:
City Link Parcel Next Day (Delivered Mon-Fri)
(This can be changed during checkout) Shipping : £8.25
VAT is being charged at 17.5% VAT : £35.03
Total : £235.24

cooler is recommened for quads so you can cut back and get a cheaper one if you want, tehn get the IP35 pro MB if you need/ want the extra features it has.
 
Ah ok - thanks for the suggestions. You both mention the E2180 - would that be able to reach a similar speed to the E6750 after being overclocked? At 660mhz behind at stock it seems that it will have a hard time catching up up :).

I'm just slightly wary as my current processor is running at a higher mhz (AMD 3700 @2.5x Ghz)
 
Yeah it would provided you've got a case with pretty decent airflow and a good cpu cooler. I've got a Freezer 7 Pro on mine (budget cooler) and it's gona all the way up to 3.5Ghz. You really would save a lot of money by getitng an E2180 and maybe a Tuniq Tower or something similar.
 
That sounds very tempting then :). My current case is a budget one (I've not got around to getting a Lian Li PC-7B or similar yet) but the motherboard runs pretty cool according to Everest - around 25'c.

Plus I'm sure the 10x multi will be better for loverclocking?
 
E2180's have a 10x multiplyer which will allow for much better OC'ing, At the minute E2180's and Q6600's are the best value proccesors.

Yeah it would provided you've got a case with pretty decent airflow and a good cpu cooler. I've got a Freezer 7 Pro on mine (budget cooler) and it's gona all the way up to 3.5Ghz. You really would save a lot of money by getitng an E2180 and maybe a Tuniq Tower or something similar.
Click to expand...

That info is a lot of help to my new build tommorow which contains an e2180 and a freezer 7.
 
Pho said:
Plus I'm sure the 10x multi will be better for loverclocking?
Click to expand...

Not necessarily. Yes it will up your CPU clock speed quicker than an E6750, but it's the FSB that really matters. Technically to get it running faster than a stock E6750 you'd have to run it faster than 3.33Ghz because the 6750 has a FSB speed of 1333Mhz (quad pumped)
 
closeratio said:
Not necessarily. Yes it will up your CPU clock speed quicker than an E6750, but it's the FSB that really matters. Technically to get it running faster than a stock E6750 you'd have to run it faster than 3.33Ghz because the 6750 has a FSB speed of 1333Mhz (quad pumped)
Click to expand...

Oh ok. I'm not too sure what to do then. Would you say the E6750 worth the extra £60 based on how far it will overclock, or will the difference be negligible compared to an overclocked E2180?

I doubt I'll be upgrading for a good while either and I obviously want something which is better than what I have.
 
In my honest opinion I'd say the E2180 is better value for money. I doubt you'll be able to clock the E6750 any faster as it FSB won't go much faster than that. The E2180 on the other hand will probably peak at 3.6Ghz, and that's a faster FSB speed as well as a faster clock speed than the E6750. I suppose it depends on how much you want to overclock. You will notice the jump though, especially form the 2Ghz stock speed f the E2180 to 3.5Ghz, and even though it has less cahce, it should be faster than the E6750 as well when clocked, desptie how close the FSB's are.

*edit* I know this probably won't apply to you, but I was reading a thread earlier where a guy was running his E3180 at around 3.7Ghz, but he was using a watercooling setup. Even more extreme, another guy had his at 4.7Ghz (yeah, you read that right lol), but that was under phase change (verrrrry expensive cooling).
 
Exactly what I wanted to hear. thanks a lot :).

I didn't realise it would get to 3.5Ghz - that's a very impressive clock.
 
Pho said:
Exactly what I wanted to hear. thanks a lot :).

I didn't realise it would get to 3.5Ghz - that's a very impressive clock.
Click to expand...

Lol no problem mate. And that's the impression I got when I heard about this CPU and was speccing up. Great thing about this is that once clocked it'll last you a good while, and maybe a year or so from now when the Q6600 has dropped below £100, you'd be able to get one of them too and clock that up to about 3.5GHz as well, with the added benefit of two extra cores and an extra 7 meg of cache :)
 
Sounds like a pretty good plan :). I'd much rather wait and buy them whey they're a decent price rather than pay through the roof.
 
Looking around it seems the GA-P35-DS3P is recommended too, I can't reallly find any reviews of the IP35 (I keep finding the -E or Pro version). There's about £10 in it so I wonder if it would be worth it?
 
As far as I know the only difference between the DS3R and the DS3P is that you can use the DS3P for crossfire (and I think it's also got one or two firewire ports as well). But I think the majority of people believe that unless you're a really hardcore gamer, it's not worth running two graphics cards at once because you never really get a massive performance increase and it's usually cheaper overall to just sell your old card and get a new one that works twice as well as your old one for not much more. And the thing is you can only use twin Ati cards in P35 motherboards anyway (I might be wrong though).
 
closeratio said:
As far as I know the only difference between the DS3R and the DS3P is that you can use the DS3P for crossfire (and I think it's also got one or two firewire ports as well). But I think the majority of people believe that unless you're a really hardcore gamer, it's not worth running two graphics cards at once because you never really get a massive performance increase and it's usually cheaper overall to just sell your old card and get a new one that works twice as well as your old one for not much more. And the thing is you can only use twin Ati cards in P35 motherboards anyway (I might be wrong though).
Click to expand...

Ah ok. I had read that lots of people had problems with the DS3R so I was a bit wary. I don't really want Crossfire/SLI so that's not an issue.

I still can't see to find the differences between these though:
GA P35C DS3R
GA-P35-DS3R

edit: Ah! :) http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showpost.php?p=10574797&postcount=7
 
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Good find. There really isn't much difference between the P35C DS3r and the P35 DS3r apart from the DDR3 compatibility, which is sort of useless if I'm honest because of the current price of RAM and that fact that you can't have both the DDR2 and the DDR3 in at the same time, although i guess it's a nice feature to have :)

And I have heard of people having issues with the DS3R too but I've been fine with mine so far and even though I'm only one person I think only around 5-10% of people have problems with theirs. This is also sometimes doe to memory compatibility issues, which can be helped as Gigabyte have tables on their website giving lists of types of memory that have been tested on the motherboard and have been proven to work.

Although saying this it doesn't mean that RAM which isn't listed in the table won't work in the board, there's just been no official tests to make sure if they do or not
 
I guess it's worth a risk then. :)

The only problem now is I'll have to take out a CD-RW/hard disk as it only has 1 IDE connector (I have two IDE hard disk's and one SATA as well as IDE CD/DVD drives) :D.
 
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