Slight Upgrade


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I currently have a EVGA 780i SLI motherboard with 8GB (4 sticks) DDR2 RAM (800Mhz I think), it has a Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4GHz CPU.

Basically, I have no money for a proper upgrade which I really need, but my system is having issues running what I need ran, running out of ram for the most part.

I was wondering what a very cheap upgrade to this motherboard would be, that would support more than 8GB of RAM? Or any other suggestions.

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How about this,

How top of the line can I get for $500 or less? Just MOBO, CPU, and RAM.

I picked this out...

http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819116781

http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813130654

http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231585

But don't know if better can be achieved. I will probably end up buying stuff on ebay or elsewhere for deals.

Not at all bad but I thought you were after having 16GB of memory? if so you'll probably want a motherboard with 4 memory slots. If the 8GB is enough for you though that's not a bad budget setup :) just bare in mind you are unlikely to be able to overclock with that chipset.

Also, I figured DDR3 would perform much better then the DDR2 8GB that I have.

No, you wouldn't notice a performance increase from RAM speeds alone.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/2232/7

You'll definitely want to look into overclocking that Q6600 though!

Edit... I didn't pay attention and noticed you're basically getting a new system. The i5 is much faster than the Q6600, and that's where the performance increase comes from.

Edited by TokiToki

Depends on the application, games benefit most from extra memory speed. As for motherboards, if you're not going to overclock a board like this should suffice:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813121599

Bare in mind, you won't need a new video card as Ivy Bridge CPU's have an integrated GPU. That was the cheapest board I could find with 4 slots, sorry. Sell your Q6600 and DDRII memory and that will help you recover some of the cost :)

get an ASUS P8B75, i3 (doesn't matter which), and 16GB DDR3 RAM. that's well under $500. not sure about your other components, but they should be fine. unless you have a really old hard drive or something.

EDIT: honestly replied without looking at the setup you picked, so i was very close :D that MSI is fine, the i5 is overkill if you're not doing gaming, spend the money on more RAM. but if you can get that setup for less than your budget, sweet.

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