Spec me an upgrade please (bogged down in details)

[k9wazere]

Hi

I'm upgrading from a 3800x2 @stock, asus a8n-e, 3gig pc3200.

I really want to get this right.

My priorities are:
1- price.. cheap but good
2- power/quiet
3- gaming (occasional, frame-rate is king, AA normally off)

I just bought a 8800gt 2nd hand, which I will probably swap with someone for a 4670 in a few weeks.

I had my eye on an e5200
g31 matx mobo*
4gig corsair pc2-6400.

*Gigabyte ga31 was the cheapest board I could find with anything better than the p945 chipset. There is no need for a matx since I have a mid-tower case, but I only need 1xIDE, 1xsata, 1xPCI-e, so I don't need anything more than matx boards provide.

I realise that with memory divider issues, I'd be limited to about 266 FSB, with a small oc resulting in 3.3ghz.

Is there any real-world reason not to be happy with that? Should I look to a more expensive motherboard, or more expensive pc2-8000 ram, in order to achieve higher FSB speeds?

If we're looking at 2-3 FPS difference (say by increasing the FSB to 333), I'm not worried about it. The extra power drain would negate such a small gain. If we're looking at 10 FPS more, say, then I'd seriously consider my options.

I'm really sitting on the fence here. I don't want to spend too much, because in all honesty my 3800x2 system is still serving me well. But I'm told the c2d is much, much faster, and of course the 45nm chips are more enviromentally friendly when leaving the computer on all day.

(And I've promised my old rig to my brother, already. Too late to back out now!)

Would be grateful for any advice.

k9

[ACook]

you'd have to check the benchmarks to see how much faster that E5200 really is.


as a comparison, the E2160 @ 2250MHz (that's oc'd) was about the same speed as the X2 4200 s939 I had when it came to encoding xvid.


But other than in encoding I didn't see much change from the A64 3000+ I had before the X2.

[hybrid2d4x4]

If you're intent on playing modern games, you should do some article/forum searching to make sure the 8800gt or even a 4670 isn't your bottleneck on your current system. If it is (which I don't think is too farfetched), then upgrading your platform wouldn't really make much of a difference.

Otherwise, your choices seem very good. I'm not sure if there's a reason you specify Corsair, but I'd just get the cheapest of the major brand names. Have you looked into the price difference to a mobo that give you a v2.0 PCI-e x16 slot to future-proof your video upgrade path? The vid cards you mentioned would definitely be your bottleneck on that system, so that would be the next logical step (if not the first, depending on what the bottleneck in your current system is).