Looking at some possible upgrades

[Elwood]

My specs are in my signature and I am looking for a little more performace from a CPU standpoint. I intend on using my 7900GT, case, PSU and drives in the upgrade.

My consern is that my motherboard is now limited to what I can place in the socket. I could get a little performace boost from the Pent D, but I could move to e Core 2 Duo for not much more money and get much better results. I am slo not opposed to going with AMD if their new release of quads later this year will use the same socket/mobo specs that I can get today.

Bottom line is that I do not want to have this outdated mobo situation that I am currently in at the moment in my next purchase.

What are others doing in the aspect?

[Elwood]

Anyon have any suggestions? My Mobo hit 42C degrees today, I think it may be time to move forward.

[odannyboy000]

If you have a LGA775 motherboard than you can't upgrade it...

Just put a C2D E6600 or better if you can afford it.

[jlreich]

I would go with a CD2. No reason to wait and see what will happen with AMD when you can get an Intel board now that you know supports a quad if you so desire to go with one in the future.

Getting a good board that supports a C2 Quad should give you plenty of upgrade room. You can also go with one of the new P35 boards that supports both DDR2 and DDR3.

Have a budget in mind?

It does make it easier since you can reuse so much of your current system. All you really need is a mobo and CPU. You can consider upgrading the ram since it is so cheap. I wouldn't worry about DDR3 right now. That's something you can add later if you when needed. But DDR2 is so dirt cheap right now you can get 2GB for $70-$90.

[Elwood]

So, intel will use the same die/socket for their upcomming quads? What chipsets are a safe bet? I assume the only safe one is the P35 b/c of it's FSB for the newer processors.

Yeah, I know memory is cheap and my current memory may be causing some heat issues with my mother board as it does not have heat spreaders.

[jlreich]

Not upcoming quads, they already here (http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=2010340343+50001157+1302825342+1051707842+138962 7502&Configurator=&Subcategory=343&description=&Ntk=&srchInDesc=).

I like the the support for DDR3 the P35 has while still supporting DDR2. And it isn't like one of the transitions boards in the sense that you have two slots for DDR and two slots for SDRAM. But rather there are four slots that can take either since both DDR2 and DDR3 use the same slot.

But it is newer and there is always the prospect of dealing with potential problems of the newest stuff. The 680i chipset would be the one that is still top notch and new but has been around long enough to work out the major bugs.

[Elwood]

I suspect that I was referring to Penryn as a newer chip. This will only be supported in the P35 chipset?

[jlreich]

Oh you are looking to the 45nm chips. I am having a hard time finding info on what chipsets will support Penryn and Nehalem. I know P35 supports Penryn, it doesn't say anything about Nehalem but I am sure it will.

Since Penryn is really just a 45nm Core2 with a some added SSE4 instructions, I would think some the current chipsets will support it, perhaps with a BIOS upgrade. The nVidia 6xx series boasts that it can support a FSB of 1333 "...giving you the flexibility to build PCs with today and tomorrow’s CPUs". Does that mean it will support the 45nm chips? I don't really know.