Techie help needed - computer upgrade question.

Ok, I'm about ready to spend a fair bit of money on a computer upgrade. But I say a fair bit - not a limitless fortune.

I've basicly got everything picked out, but for one question.

Within the price range I want, I can either go for:

Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 (Each core running at 2.66GHz), and 2 1-gig sticks of Corsair XMS2 DDR2-800 ram...

OR

Intel Core 2 Duo X6800 (Each core running at 2.93GHz), and 2 1-gig sticks of Corsair's regular DDR2-800 ram, non-XMS2 flavor.

These are the only two options within the context of this discussion, so do not suggest I go with an Athalon, or ask get both, or for 4 gigs of memory, or whatever.

For evaluation purposes, I'm going for a single (IE, no SLI) 7900GTX-512 video card, I'm not going with a RAID setup, just a single SATA drive, and yes, my mobo is up to snuff for either choice. Also for reference, I'm mostly upgrading for gaming reasons, although I do a lot of multitasking between photoshop and SL and iTunes and Poser all at once, things like that.

At this point, I'm leaning towards the X6800 and the cheaper ram... Because, A, I don't intend to overclock (I'm too cautious, and not enough of a techie that I'd risk it on my own), and the XMS2 hardly makes any secret that it's geared for overclockers, and B) The cost of later upgrading my ram is a lot cheaper than later upgrading the next step of the processor. But I'm willing to hear alternate theories.

Don't blow the money on the more expensive RAM if you aren't going to overclock. Corsair makes damn good memory: even their ValueSelect is decent stuff for your average gaming computer.

If you aren't gonna OC, get the better processor.

If you are gonna OC, I don't do many Intel OC's but considering those Core 2's are more similar to AMD designs, I'd say you could OC that Core 2 Duo up to the more expensive processor's speeds with that XMS, provided you had adequate cooling.

Edit: No matter what, the processor will be your bottleneck. You might wanna consider the cheaper processor, the cheaper RAM, and then sink some cash into a 10,000 RPM Western Digital Raptor Hard Drive. You might find your system to be more balanced that way.

Well, I'm going to liquid cool the processor I think, which isn't even strictly needed without OCing I know. I have no fundamental objection to OCing, except for two things - I'm scared to ruin my processor, and I really don't know enough to feel comfortable doing it myself.

I'll look into what the hard drive would run out of curiosity.

Hm. Wow. Those gaming hard drives are tiny. Expensive, but tiny. What do you do, just put the OS and one or two games on them, then everything else on a second drive?

you can do that. some people do, and just leave the other hd for storage of stuff thats you dont need to access fast, or very often.

You can get a 150GB Raptor

http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?ProductCode=101257

P.S. Dont' watercool unless you overclock. If you watercool that processor or put on any cooler other than the one that comes with it, you void the warranty.

The memory latency wont make a huge diffrence, you'll probably get
better performance out of the faster chip. There's some reviews of the
core 2 duo chip out that include performance diffrenced with diffrent memory
out on the net.

And ill agree, unless your gunna overclock or your computer will be
operating in 100+ deg temp's you should'nt need it. If I recall there
cooler then the P4's were.

And have you checked Newegg for parts?

Water Cooling Kits: Xoxide CrazyPC FrozenCPU

Newegg is the shit

Well, except for me. They tax TN.

Aye. Xoxide taxes me since they're also in Pennsylvania.

I used to be sold on Corsair. I still have 4 sticks of 512 in my machine.
I also have two more sticks sitting on my desk waiting to go in for warranty.
Now this is 2 sticks out of 4 that went bad. I ended up buying more because there was a heck of a low deal at Tiger Direct.
These are XMS, I do like them (other then the obvious issue) but I think the value sticks will serve you as well. For being premium I am just not impressed with XMS as much as I was.

Just make sure you don't skimp on the hard drives--stay completely away from Maxtor and Western Digital.

Maxtor? YES!! Crap crap crap crap. Did I mention they're crap?
WD? Not bad. Had one die among a dozen or so.
Seagate? No problems yet.

Samsung? AVOID!!!!
Hitachi?? Not sure yet.
Fujitsu??? So far so good in my dinky Dell Laptop. Does what it should.... so far.

Your best steps are going to be towards eliminating bottlenecks, and the major bottleneck (since you're only getting 2G of memory) is going to be the drive your swap file is on. If you can, get a performance SATA and dedicate your swap file to it. The XMS/non-XMS, 2.6/2.9 will count for far less than the performance of your swap file drive.