Time for a new Processor and Motherboard

How about this one? It';s a very nice board indeed, with onboard Firewire:

http://www.giga-byte.com/Products/Mo...ame=GA-P35-DQ6

Excellent board ^^^

For a little bit of a saving and the same chipset with 2 x Firewire ports, the Rev 2.0 of the DS4 is also excellent, the differences being that is doesn't have a Quad BIOS, and more USB ports on the backplate:

http://www.giga-byte.com/Products/Mo...ame=GA-P35-DS4


Liam

Ok thanks for the links, I will look into those for sure.

If I buy this http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16819115029 does it come with a fan? I am used to the Retail Intel processors coming with a fan.

Yep it comes with the stock intel cooler as it is a Retail box. Any OEM processors will not include a cooler.


Liam

My experience of the stock Core2Duo cooler is that it isn't particularly good. I got a big drop in CPU temp by changing it for a better one.

What did you go for Nick?

In my experience it isn't too bad if you use some better TIM. (AS5/Ceramique) ...Although you can't beat a huge chunk of copper with a 120mm fan attached to it. :)


Liam

I went for the Scythe Samurai, as I particularly wanted one that uses the standard C2D mounting pins (there is a big plate on the back of my mobo). I had used AS5 on the stock cooler, but my temps weren't very good at all. When I took the stock one off to fit the Samurai, the paste was nicely spread, so it definitely wasn't that I'd fitted it badly in the first place.

SuperSparks I see that you own both the Core 2 Duo and the Athlon X2, which do you like better? I never owned a AMD processor yet but I have heard they are better for gaming.

They are both fine processors, but of my pair the C2D is by far the better performer. I don't do any gaming though, so I can't really comment on that.

Were I to build another rig today, I would still go for the Core 2. When the Barcelona-core AMD becomes readily available for a reasonable price, I might well go for that though, as it is a true quad-core, rather than Intel's idea of 2 dual-cores glued together.

Well I'm really not a huge gamer but I do play a couple online. I mostly do video editing so I will stick with the Core 2 Duo.

Quote:

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When the Barcelona-core AMD becomes readily available for a reasonable price, I might well go for that though, as it is a true quad-core, rather than Intel's idea of 2 dual-cores glued together.

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Let's hope there are some apps with multicore support by then, they are just getting around to dual support and quad wades in, and with Skulltrail around the corner software is gonna be flailing.

Personally i don't see any advantage to native quads over Kentsfield/Penryn/Nahelam quads, on paper the only thing they have that the core 2's dropped is HT (3.0Ghz apparently) and on paper a FX stock at 3.2 with 2mb L2 cache and 1mb L3, vs a QX9770 stock at 3.2 with 12mb L2 cache (6mb shared between each core pair) and already seeing overclocks approaching 6Ghz, i'm firmly in the Intel camp for the coming years....i just hope the price of DDR3 drops quickly. :D


Liam