Worth the extra money?

[Richimself]

I'm thinking of building a new system for gaming and it' definately not going to be top of the line but about the processor.. i was thinking of getting a 3000+ and overclocking to 2.2Ghz. Now the question is: should i fork over the extra money for the 3500+ with the standard 2.2Ghz clock or just save some money and OC the 3000+? my big concern is whether or not it will bottleneck.. with the card i plan to get which is: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814125193

and btw any criticism on the card?

 

[HAVOC]

Well, If you're on a tight budget then there isn't too much you can do for a gaming system. You already said, "it's not going to be top of the line." Which is fine...

I'd go with atleast the AMD 3200+ Venice CPU. For reliable OCin' you better have a GOOD motherboard and some GOOD ram.

As far as that vanilla 6800 goes... I wouldn't waste your money on that crap. Those cards are just about as good as not having one and using onboard video. Save a little money and grab at least the 6800GT.

 

[Lonewolf5460]

vannila 6800 just beats the 6600gt in benchmarks just get the 6600gt and o/c it.

 

[Elbatrop1]

Havok, I would have expected more from you.

The 6800 is a very good card, for the money. It obviously isnt the best, but it is still good for what it's worth. I would call the Vanilla 6800 garbage, if I was looking to build a $5000 computer, though, I guess.

As for CPUs, the 3000+ Venice will overclock to 2.2 easily. As Havok said, make sure to get a good mobo and RAM to support such overclocks.

 

[Richimself]

Alright, thanks for the input, any suggestion on mobo/ram? i was thinking of just going with corsair valueselect.. is that not aggressive enough to support the OC?

 

[C0RR0SIVE]

If your on a tight budget a 6600GT will do fine for most games, that is if you don't plan on playing most maxed out....

 

[Richimself]

well what i'm really looking for is to be able to play CS:Source with better frames.. currently i'm getting moderate framerate lag with my 2ghz intel proc, fx5500, and some crappy 512mb sdram :/ so i'm just looking for better frames there, and possibly to be able to play f.e.a.r. also.

 

[Flanker]

Corsair ValueSelect is known for being only value RAM and barely overclocking. My ValueSelect fails partially at 214 MHz and fully fails at 215MHz, so its not even worth overclocking. For a 245 MHz HTT overclock, I would recommend buying Patriot XBL RAM. The link is for one stick of 512MB so if you want 1GB of RAM, just order two of those. Those will easily overclock to 245Mhz to give you a 2.2GHz overclock.

 

[Richimself]

ahh nice, thanks for the link, i'll probably be giving that ram a try then any suggestions on the mobo though?

 

[no_Wedge]

3000 is more than enough, unless you save for a dual core