upgrade? Am I an overclockaholic?
I am currently running a socket 939 rig with a 2.0 gig CPU and one meg of RAM. DDR 2 is ridiculously cheap right now and I can get e seriesdual core Intel CPU for around 80 bucks. Throw in a mainboard, now I can get the whole deal done for around $220. The end goal would be to overclock into the 3 gig range with two gigs of RAM. One of the reasons I am contemplating this is that it appears to offer a performance increase on the cheap. The other is that I have on overclocking problem. I have had 2 939 boards that were very finicky about RAM, generally didn't overclock very well and have overall been a pain in the rear. I figure that the e series CPU, even with its limited cache, will give me the same overclocking buzz that I got from my first Celeron 300a. One legitimate reason for doing the upgrade is that I in using voice recognition software more often. It's improved a lot and with a strong rig, actually works. The other is that I may get back into gaming. I am waffling between two Intel 35 chipset boards -- giga byte or an Asus board with integrated WiFi. The plain-vanilla giga byte is less than a hundred bucks, I can get the other board for 139 at the egg. Thoughts, opinions, insults, and any other input would be greatly appreciated.>

Go Core Duo 2 but IMO don't bother overclocking. Just not worth it anymore. It's very hard to get stability with dual channel memory. It's easy to overclock with memory in single channel mode, but then any benefit from the overclock is lost in the loss of memory performance. But if you're willing to go through the pain there are some Intel Core Duo 2 chips that do seem to be very overclockable. I'm sure others will chime in, and you can check out some reviews. But yeah, DDR2 is obscenely cheap and I can't see it getting much cheaper.

I just sold both of my x2 939 rigs to put together a C2D rig with a E6550 cpu. My mobo should be here tomorrow so we'll find out if it was worth it or not soon. Funny thing is, I got more for my 939 stuff than what I paid for the Intel C2D setup, and to add further insult, the C2D is supposed to me quite a bit faster overall.

Well, I pulled the trigger, but haven't bought the cpu yet. So far: MB ASUS P5K-E/WIFI-AP P35 775 RT OCZ Platinum Revision 2 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) The DDR2 is $40 after rebate....

I got the same DDR2. Hopefully my mobo gets here early today and I can get the system up and running soon!