Upgrade advice needed

[NuTz]

I'm trying to price up a core duo rig, got a few queries;

I've decided on a Intel Core 2 Duo E8200 LGA775 'Wolfdale' 2.66GHz (1333FSB) - Retail and a GT8800.

But I cant deceide whether to get the P35 or X38 chipset Gigabyte DS4 - I cant see any obvious difference apart from price?

Also i want to get 4gb of RAM, but cant decide what pair to get as there are many different prices and timings... does it make that much difference?

e.g Crucial Ballistix Tracer RED 4GB £20 more than Corsair 4GB DDR2 XMS2 PC2-6400C5 TwinX (2x2GB)

Any advice welcome.

 

[NuTz]

decided on RAM, can anyone advise me on the motherboard chipsets??

 

[Tetras]

motherboard chipsets

X38 has PCI-E 2.0 and more PCI-Express lanes (32 PCI-E 2.0 lanes and 6 PCI-E 1.1, usually get 2 or 3 PCI-Express 16X slots, with the third running at 4X) and P35 is 16X/4X (assuming second slot is on the board).

That is pretty much all you need to worry about between them...

 

[ih8modem]

X28

X38 is probably more future-proof if you planning on keeping it for a long time. It has more of the newer gizmos and will probably clock better too as it was designed for the newer CPUs (that said it's not like P35 is that old either)...

 

[BlackBat]

Many people here would recommend a P35 based board, however, I built a system using a Gigabyte GA-X38-DS5 & G.Skill 4GB DDR2 PQ PC2-8000C5 & I'm very happy with the result.