Upgrade advice some minor questions please, much appreciated!

[Serial45]

Hi guys,
Well i've read a wealth of threads and I still have some minor questions.

At present I have a dual core 4400+ with DFI lanparty board, 2 gig of crucial ballistix memory blah blah.

I bought an 8800GTX at christmas, multiple sources have informed my my bottleneck is my CPU and RAM and i'd be best upgrading.
I've found a buyer to take my DFI lan party, memory and CPU off me for £260!

Well here's what i'm getting / need advice on.

CPU
I've decided on the :
- Intel Core 2 DUO E6600 "LGA775 Conroe" 2.40GHz (1066FSB)

I could go higher but seriously don't see the point of almost doubling the cost for the e6700!

Motherboard please advise?


I can't decide whether it's worth it going for 965 or 975 or 680i. I've read arguements for both, but seems to be evenly divided. What would you say? cost is not an issue.


But i'm thinking about :

- Intel Extreme D975XBX2KR BAD AXE 2 975X (Socket 775)

And

Asus Commando Intel 965 (Socket 775)

After some furhter reading it seems that the 680i boards are receiving excellent review results.

The big question is memory, I do not want to spend more than arouund £280, I have my mind set on going for :

Corsair 2GB DDR2 XMS2 Dominator PC2-8500C5 TwinX (2x1GB)

is it worth it? I want to get a healthy overclock out of my system. I was hoping for 3.2ghz i'll be happy, should I save my pennies and get cheaper memory that will suffice a 3.2ghz overclock? Can you recommend any other that is better for my money?

Will this memory pair ok with both the motherboards listed above? or should i change brand.

Cash isn't really too much of an issue I'm willing to go up to 700-800 for cpu, memory, motherboard and cpu cooling.

I've pretty much decided on this for cooling (has lots of excellent reviews):

Tuniq Tower 120 CPU Cooler

Any other recommendations / anything better?


I currently have a 120mm fan and thermalright heatsink which is a mammoth cooler, but at full speed it's noisy as hell (60+ Snr). bah i'm just rambling now lol.

Thanks in advance guys


- another question I have is about RAID?

I have two 250GB drives setup in a striped raid. They contain a wealth of data on them
Should i be ok plugging them into new raid ports? Will I lose the data? They are currently plugged into silicon image ports.

 

[Serial45]

Was contemplating maybe going for cheaper memory and getting 4 gigs of the stuff?

What are you're opinions?

The 6400 Crucial ballistix orOCZ 6400 plat rev 2 4*1gb

 

[steve258]

All mobos you listed will be fine, although I'm not sure about overclocking on Intel mobos. If you want SLI then go for 680i, otherwise ASUS commando is very good too. Both will overclock very well indeed. 975 is still a very good chipset but is beginning to show it's age, it doesn't oc as well as the other 2 chipsets and atm only the ASUS P5W DH is still worth considering.

With regards to memory I think PC8500 is a waste of money, save some cash and get a decent <£200 PC6400 kit, it is more than enough to OC the E6600; Geil PC6400C4, OCZ Plat. XTC are the ones I know which are cheap and very ocable.

Don't think 4Gb is really necessary atm even with Vista, perhaps in the near future it will be, so I'd probably stick with 2Gb for now tbh and wait till 2*2Gb kits are readily available.

Not sure about the Raid though you may have to create a new array which means all your current data will be lost.

That cooler is a very popular one so it must be really good.

 

[Serial45]

Here's my first final SPEC

What do you guys think of this?

- Motherboard BFG Nforce 680i (would have chose ega but issues with the heatsink / fan i want)
- E6600
- CellShock 2GB (2 x 1GB) DDR2 PC2-8000C4 1000MHz Dual Channel Kit (i've decided to go with the faster memory - for an extra £70 i will reach those higher clock speeds @ 4-4-4-12. I might as well!
- Tuniq tower 120 cooler.

Think I would pull off 3.2-3.6ghz 1:1 stable with that spec?