we need to upgrade and looking at a core2duo system, either a 6300 or 6400 with probably 2gb ram and about the 80gb mark on a sata drive. whats the best prices about then and can anyone suggest a good priced motherboard that is reliable?

spec wise on a m/b we are looking at 10/100/1000 ethernet, possibly sound and first of all vga would be nice so we don't have to fork out on a video card for another month or so. just making things easier

If you can wait for a bit then do so, the E6xxx series are meant to be reducing in price shortly - see Core 2 Duo price cuts on the way - TechSpot News

The 2 mentioned Core 2 Duo processors are 2mb cache, whereas the E6600 has 4mb cache and whips the AMD FX processors of a higher price.

The mobo choice also depends on what you want to do in the future too...

Personally I'm holding off for a core 2 quad

why?

most apps don't make use of the multiple CPU's now, even after they've been available for years. it's is unbeleivably hard to program software to utilise more than one CPU

However if you look in your task manager you will find more than one application running, and then there are some hidden ones

Add virus scanners etc to the equation and suddenly multi-core starts to make sense. Even Intel's Hyper Threading provided a reasonable increase in performance.

On our application it was about 30% without doing any further work.

On an application-by-application basis there is not much benefit unless the application is coded to take advantage. However on a system with a few applications, say a web browser, an email client, a virus scanner running in the background, msn/aim/yahoo etc IM clients, SkyPE perhaps, suddenly it isn't too bad at all

Have u seen the folding results out of one of those quad core xeons? it's pretty impressive

More cores will make your computer faster... period...

altho it wont make specific applications faster.. it just improves the overall responsiveness... Intel had hyperthreading which helped lots

I know vista has much better process shceduling than previous O/S do.. even on my "lowly" single core a64 the system is much more snappy and quicker to respond even if the cpu is maxed out, and my core 2 duo laptop just flies along.. things sometimes crash and i dont notice

Have u seen the folding results out of one of those quad core xeons? it's pretty impressive

Quad core Xeons you say... no I wouldn't have a clue what the folding results out of one of those would look like, let alone a box with two of them in

Novatech are normally quite good for cpu/mobo/ram bundles, check out this one:

Motherboard Bundle Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 1024MB 667Mhz DDR2 Heatsink And Fan Gigabyte Motherboard : mbb-c2d635

You would have to add an extra 1Gb of ram though

Or

Intel Core 2 DUO LGA775 E6400 2.13GHz Retail / Gigabyte 965P DS3 / 2GB Corsair XMS2-6400C5 DDR2 Dual Channel Kit - Bundle

Quad core Xeons you say... no I wouldn't have a clue what the folding results out of one of those would look like, let alone a box with two of them in

Lucky bugger :P

Asus P5 series m/b?

Gigabyte quite good too.

Avoid Foxxconn, MSI, DFI (overpriced)

:iagree:

Never had a problem with a Gigabyte mobo... I have them in nearly all my machines

I bought myself a gigabyte DS3 mobo for my E6400 not long ago. I am happy with it apart from the fact that it switched off by itself when the first power up then switch itself back on after few seconds. It is normal according gigabyte's website, but it almost gave me a heart attack.

I would choose gigabyte every time when I have the option, very good quality reliable boards, Ive found asus good but not as good, Brands below that are only worth buying if you are building a low spec cheapend computer. I made the mistake of buying abit motherboards for my latests pc's and have had huge hassles with them compared to Gigabyte :(. Unfortunately the budget was tight and give the choice between the top of the range graphics card and a top of the range motherboard, I took the graphics card, and will replace the motherboards when funds allow.

Another vote for the gigabyte DS3 or DS4, all the 965 chipsets do the funny power down restart thing, made setting up my vapo a PITA.

Years ago Abit were excellent but IMHO they have gone right down the pan. Asus aren't bad.

If you want a true budget mobo you won't go far wrong with an Asrock.

[*]Core2Duo E6600

i hope your paying for some of this :eek:

Why limit things to the GTS? The GTX has far more power and once you're up to those sort of prices whats an extra £70 for the extra horsepower. With the current 8800 cards you might as well go for the cheap branded boards as all the boards regardless of price are made by nvidia themselves so are all the same quality, the only difference is the stickers on the cooler and fans and the software bundle. For £70 more than the cost of the EVGA gts I can get the GTX, Brought two "pajit" brand 8800GTX's before christmas. As the cards get older the manufacturers will be producing their own boards instead of rebranding nvidia made ones but for now they are all the same. Even the coolers are identical on most cards I think one manufacturer uprated the cooling solution but its not needed. I dont have any temperature with min on the stock cooling.

Would agree on seperate audio instead of relying on onboard solutions though.

I also went for two smaller capacity sata drives instead of one huge one, to run a raid0 and increase disk performace by 80%.

I also went for two smaller capacity sata drives instead of one huge one, to run a raid0 and increase disk performace by 80%.

And double the chances of losing all your data

Scan have got a 500gb WD drive for 90quid.... im sorely tempted :eek:

Wow! thats not bad for 500Gb... think I'll hang on and get 3x1Tb drives later in the year for a nice Raid 5 array

And double the chances of losing all your data

Thats what back up is for. Needed whether you have one disk or two, halving your performance isnt a replacement for a good backup.

And double the chances of losing all your data

i think you're actually more than doubling your chances of losing all your data :confused:

Regardless of howmany drives you have if your drive goes down youve lost your data, and a lack of backup wont save you if you have one drive or two.

Personally I back up and run faster systems. I dont buy a nvidia 6600gt on the grounds that it has 1/4 as many transistors to go potentiall go wrong. I dont go for single strip memory solutions to avoid "doubling the chances of failure" I go with dual strip solutions to take advantage of DDR.

I run a dual core processor despite two cores meaning double the chance of failure.

I also have two identical PC's on for me one for the wife, despite it "doubling the risks" it also means we can both do stuff at once, doubling the amount that can be done at one time.

Parallelism its the way of the future.

RAID 0 sucks balls, been there, done that...:P