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I have access to a free C2D E7500 cpu. I would need to buy a socket 775 motherboard and would probably choose to get DDR3 RAM.

I am currently using a crappy socket 939 Athlon 64 3700+ with 3GB of DDR2.

I don't foresee me having $400 anytime soon to do a Sandy Bridge (or Ivy) upgrade.

So would throwing $100 at this E7500 make any sense?

I use my system for general office tasks, photoshop (nothing major), some video encoding, etc.

Do you feel constrained by your current system? I could imagine you might be hitting memory limits and paging to disk at times, particularly when video editing and possibly photoshop. If that's the case, and given where memory prices are -- and the ongoing commercial life of DDR3 -- you're better off investing in that than trying to stuff more DDR2 into your current rig, even if it entails buying a mobo as well. On the other hand, an SSD might give a bigger boost to your system overall. But the real question is whether you need to spend any money at all.

Another option: Keep the DDR2 from your old rig and just get a 775 board that supports it. I'm running a 775 board with DDR2-1066 right now and it does pretty well for itself. The trick with DDR3 + a Core 2 is that you are still stuck with the stupid Front Side Bus to communicate with memory & all the peripherals. That effectively means that the FSB, and not your RAM, is the bottleneck.

You can save some money (admittedly not a lot with current DDR3 prices) by just reusing your existing RAM and getting a decent second-hand 775 board that uses DDR2. I have an X38 chipset DDR2 board from Asus (I think it's a Rampage, I got it in 2008 so details are dim). Is it a step up from a socket-939 Athlon? Hells yes. It's by no means a modern badass system, but you should be able to get by for a while until you are ready for a bigger upgrade.

You can have my ASUS commando board (S775, DDR2) if you'll pay the shipping. It's been sitting in my old machine for a year, doing nothing. Might as well be useful again for someone.

939 didn't support DDR2 ?

http://www.amazon.com/ASRock-Intel-Moth ... 000&sr=8-1

decent lga 775 board for 42 dollars. Sold new in box. Its matx but still a good price

+ cheap 4gb ram for 20 dollars = under 75 total price

Seems like maybe the way to go here...

r00t61 wrote:

You can have my ASUS commando board (S775, DDR2) if you'll pay the shipping. It's been sitting in my old machine for a year, doing nothing. Might as well be useful again for someone.

This is probably your best choice. DDR2 is good enough for what you want, I would just re-use your current RAM.

UberGerbil wrote:

Do you feel constrained by your current system? I could imagine you might be hitting memory limits and paging to disk at times, particularly when video editing and possibly photoshop. If that's the case, and given where memory prices are -- and the ongoing commercial life of DDR3 -- you're better off investing in that than trying to stuff more DDR2 into your current rig, even if it entails buying a mobo as well. On the other hand, an SSD might give a bigger boost to your system overall. But the real question is whether you need to spend any money at all.

I really do feel constrained by this system. Photoshop is slow when I have multiple large images open. Encoding video takes forever. Worst of all is when working with large RAR and PAR2 archives the system will absolutely drop to its knees.

Sunburn74 wrote:

http://www.amazon.com/ASRock-Intel-Motherboard-G31M-S-R2-0/dp/B003WQ9U1O/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1330234000&sr=8-1

decent lga 775 board for 42 dollars. Sold new in box. Its matx but still a good price

+ cheap 4gb ram for 20 dollars = under 75 total price

Seems like maybe the way to go here...

There's the problem. Most of the affordable 775 boards only have 2 DIMM for DDR2. I have 4 1GB sticks laying around to use.

r00t61 wrote:

You can have my ASUS commando board (S775, DDR2) if you'll pay the shipping. It's been sitting in my old machine for a year, doing nothing. Might as well be useful again for someone.

PM sent.

JJCDAD wrote:

There's the problem. Most of the affordable 775 boards only have 2 DIMM for DDR2. I have 4 1GB sticks laying around to use.

Perhaps simply consider those losses? You honestly may end up spending more to use those 4 sticks than the sticks are worth.

Deathright wrote:

939 didn't support DDR2 ?

You're right. This 939 machine is running DDR memory. Not sure why I thought it was DDR2. But I DO have 4GB of DDR2 to use.

Deathright wrote:

939 didn't support DDR2 ?

Socket 939 = Dual-channel, unbuffered DDR1

Socket 754 = Single-channel, unbuffered DDR1

Socket 940 = Dual-channel, registered DDR1

Socket AM2 = Dual-channel, unbuffered DDR2

Socket AM2+ = Dual-channel, unbuffered DDR2 (it supported the higher voltages/wattages needed for Phenom chips)

Socket AM3 = Dual-channel, unbuffered DDR3