Which Quad upgrade?? On 775

[DarthBaldylocks]

Hello everyone, may i wish you all happy new year too!

My dilema.... I have a Asus P5N32E SLI motherboard at 1333fsb. At the mo i have 4 gb of OCZ 800mhz mem and a 9600gt.
Now, i have ordered some OCZ 1150mhz mem 2 x 2gb and soon will be ordering a Quad chip to replace my E6600. I have a Huge Zalman fan which does the job! But i have never needed to overclock.

Ive seen a Quad chip at 2.5ghz at 1333fsb for around £105. Could i overclock the chip still as its natural frequancey is the max freq that my motherboard can run??? Its designed to overclock etc? Thought of this chip as its the cheapest ive seen? BUT i dont want to not spend a little more if the more expensive ones are better? Or justifiable? As in why spend £60 extra for 0.16 ghz? just overclock? Is the Yorkfield a cut down or something? Please could someone clarify? They say you pay for what you get? Budget of £150 as i wanted to save as much as poss to get a twin 9800gt to Sli. Many thanks all.

[stopthekilling77]

Having owned this board previously, I recommend just buying the best clocked CPU you can and go for a *very* mild overclock. It's a great board for dual-cores but its chipset is known to run a bit too hot for quads. Anyway you could get a Q6600 @ 2.4 and push to maybe 2.75 before your temperatures will likely get too hot.

[kgoncher]

For 775 socket quads, the speed is in the Cache (and OC to 3.2 to 3.4)
Q8300 4MB 2.5 GHz
Q9400 6MB 2.66 GHz
Q9550 12MB 2.83 GHz
waiting for the 9550 to get cheaper,
Kurt