all I do is play games and have a x800gto2 OCed to a x850xtpe and i was wondering with my upgrade how should I spend about 360 on a processor and ram. what performs better in the newest games say a 64 3500 and 1 gig of random ram or say a 3000 slightly overclocked and 2 gigs of pretty good ram? thanks
if you like overclocking, you could get a 3000+ venice core and with some good ram OC it. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16820146883 that's some good ram that would should get the processor at some good speeds.
here some good ram that has a good OC reputation i believe, its crucial ballistix, and its the same price as the OCZ http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16820146546 buy two of these and they should be pretty good.
Assuming the 3500 is still clocked higher it will still perform better in most games as pretty much only Battlefield 2 and possibly Fear make use of the extra gig. However with a good OC, say up to 2.4 or higher on the 3000+ you basically just got yourself a 3800+ for less than half the price. So I'd recommend a 3000+, 3200 if you're not too keen on a massive OC, 2 of these: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16820220139 and some games or something. That ram will give you crazy OC potential at a pretty good price really, you can pay more than that for PC3200. It will function properly with most motherboards too so don't worry, there are a fair amount of people with socket 754 boards using this stuff so it's pretty flexable.
I've got the PC3200 stuff of the Patriot XBL and it can do up to DDR570-580. I don't know what the PC4800 XBL stuff can do, but if it's like the PC3200 stuff, you'll have a nice OC'ing RAM that won't cost a kidney.
