With some recommendations from the kind folks on this forum, I completely upgraded by old comp last night. New specs:
Intel Core 2 Duo E6420
Gigabyte P35-DS3R
2x1gb Crucial Ballistix DDR2 800 Low latency
MSI 8600GT Silent Heatpipe PCI-E
this replaces an AMD Athlon 2000 and an Abit NF7-S2 motherboard (nforce 3 chipset)...so, yeah, its much faster.
Vista Ultimate installed in about 30 minutes without a hitch. My performance index (Vista benchmark) was a 3.1 CPU up to a 5.1 now. All my stats are in the 5's now with the CPU as the lowest score. Idle temp was 25 C on the CPU.
After installing the chipset drivers I could barely keep from checking out the BIOS tweaks and overclocking. This board is definitely geared toward that segment. A few quick keystrokes and my FSB went up from 266 to 337, raising my CPU from 2.13ghz to 2.7ghz no problem with a 32 C idle load.
Today I'll install some other benchmarking tools...Sandra Lite and SuperPi maybe and start tweaking it out.
One question:
I bought my CPU from Fry's and it had previously been opened and returned. The intel stock fan had its thermal pad still there but it looked a little thinner than usual. Should I get some thermal grease to supplement the pad?
(I know, people will probably say dump the stock fan and get a real OCing fan).
Intel Core 2 Duo E6420
Gigabyte P35-DS3R
2x1gb Crucial Ballistix DDR2 800 Low latency
MSI 8600GT Silent Heatpipe PCI-E
this replaces an AMD Athlon 2000 and an Abit NF7-S2 motherboard (nforce 3 chipset)...so, yeah, its much faster.
Vista Ultimate installed in about 30 minutes without a hitch. My performance index (Vista benchmark) was a 3.1 CPU up to a 5.1 now. All my stats are in the 5's now with the CPU as the lowest score. Idle temp was 25 C on the CPU.
After installing the chipset drivers I could barely keep from checking out the BIOS tweaks and overclocking. This board is definitely geared toward that segment. A few quick keystrokes and my FSB went up from 266 to 337, raising my CPU from 2.13ghz to 2.7ghz no problem with a 32 C idle load.
Today I'll install some other benchmarking tools...Sandra Lite and SuperPi maybe and start tweaking it out.
One question:
I bought my CPU from Fry's and it had previously been opened and returned. The intel stock fan had its thermal pad still there but it looked a little thinner than usual. Should I get some thermal grease to supplement the pad?
(I know, people will probably say dump the stock fan and get a real OCing fan).