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[Harpmaker]

An update on the Really Cheap Really Fast Computer.

The GigaByte GA-965P-DS3 mobo is selling for $99 from Newegg with free shipping.

Incredible memory deals can be had at slickdeals.net. I'm talking two 1GB sticks of DDR2 800 MHz RAM for less than $50!

The P-805D CPU is going for $58. The P-915D for $72, and the core 2 duo e4300 (the current darling of the OC crowd) for $114 from Newegg.

The e4300 seems to like cheaper RAM than the older chips, about anything will do, so the higher price would be more than offset by the savings in RAM cost!

For just a bit more than those cheap deal computers from Dell you can have a system that will blow their doors off!

[Harpmaker]

Update #2

The Core 2 Duo CPU's just plain spank the older Pentium D chips. That pretty much takes the D-805 and D-915 CPU's out of the running for me. If someone had to pinch each penny they spent on a new system until it bled, then maybe the 915 would be okay, but other than that - forget it.

Below are three articles that should be read in-order to explain the current CPU overclock situation.

The first article compares overclocking the E4300 and the E6300 CPU's, and compares them to a stock E6700 CPU. If I read the article correctly, the main difference is that the E4300 can use slower, thus cheaper, RAM and doesn't stress memory as hard as the E6300 at the (almost) same overclocked speed (~3.5GHz). Performance of the E4300 and E6300 are almost the same. At this time, the E4300 ($130) is only $25 less than the E6300. For me, it's the E4300's ability to use cheaper RAM that tilts my decision to use that chip for my next system.

Note that this article uses the same GigaByte motherboard I had planned to use. The other two reviews use a less capable ASUS mobo for some strange reason. Also note how much faster the OC'ed E6300 is compared to the stock E6700, this will come into play when you read the other articles.

http://www.techspot.com/review/40-core2-e4300-vs-e6300-overclocking/

The second article compares the E6300 to the E6700 in both the stock and overclocked state. The main thing to notice is that the ASUS motherboard in this article could only OC the E6300 to 3.0GHZ while the GigaByte mobo in the first article got the same CPU up to 3.5GHz. It makes one wonder what the GigaByte mobo could do with the E6700.

http://www.techspot.com/article/13-intel-core2duo-e6300-e6700-overclocking/

The last article shows how the Pentium D CPU's are smacked down hard by the newer Intel chips. OC'ing the D chips would lessen the gap, but it would still be large and the D series run much hotter than the C2D series.

This is the first review of the first affordable Quad core Intel CPU (the Q6600, currently $300). I was disappointed that they didn't try to OC the Quad, but I guess they have to leave something to do for the next review.

Of interest to me was that the Quad is utilized by many existing video and image editing software programs, but not current games. This is a major blow to the OC'ing crowd since most of them want the extra punch to get higher frame-rates and/or higher resolution with games. I don't care about games that much. In fact, my use for an overclocked system is video encoding! If the Q6600 OC'ed as well as the E series I would give it serious consideration.
Addendum: I just found out that the Q6600 is almost guaranteed to OC to 3GHz on cheap RAM. Oh, the possibilities...

http://www.techspot.com/review/36-intel-core2-quad-q6600/