Help Me Upgrade

I have an old 975x motherboard the ASUS P5WDH and was wondering if it was worth upgrading the CPU and the video card.

I have a 8800gt vid card
and a Pentium D 805 CPU

I was thinking maybe the e8600 or the q6600. I was hoping it would be worthwhile to upgrade 1 more time on the motherboard.

I have a good power supply corsair hx1000

thank you

q6600 might be a good choice the board does support it if your bios is current

So if I got a q6600 would an ATI 4890 be a good video upgrade? Is the motherboard able to take advantage of the speed or will it bottleneck?

Also since this motherboard doesn't overclock very well especially with quad cores(so Ive read), would I get better performance with an E8600 or the quad?

QUADS do not OC well on the i975x, if at all, so forget that.
I would also make sure that there is a BIOS that supports the E8600 as well as any other E0 Stepping CPU.
The video card should be no problem. I have run 3870s in Xfire and benched a couple of 48XXs with my ABIT AW9.
Just make sure you have a real power supply!
An early 1066 CONROE C2D will be your best bet as far as upgrading your CPU. The 1333 versions have to be overclocked in the 1066 strap anyway. You'll never get that much FSB out of it anyway. It takes some MCH voltage to keep an i975x stable at and past 400 FSB. Remember that the i975x was designed (originally) for Pentium D. PD had big multis so you didn't need mega FSB to acheive greater CPU speed.
You can get an E6600 these days for about 160 bucks. Get one of those and a good cooler because an E6600 is a furnace.
I have run two E6300s, an E6420, an E6600, E6750, an E8400 and tested a Q6600 on my AW9. I am currently running an E7300 at 400x10 on it, which does incredibly well all things considered. They're not but 130 bucks.

So if I can get a Bios that supports the e8600 you think that would be a good way to go? Otherwise go with an older c2d.

45nm core 2's seem to oc pretty well compared to the 65nm parts. not sure why though, may have to do with the lower cpu VTT and GTL settings used on the P65/975X chipsets. yea a E8600 would be a good choice if you couldnt find a E8400 E0. your psu is way overkill for what you have, like my motto is "pay a bit more now to save alot more later", with reguard to a psu buy. 8800GT is still a strong card for gaming, i would only upgrade the card if your not getting the FPS your after in the games your playing. otherwise i would save the money for something else down the road or use it for better cooling on the cpu or even getting a SSD. the SSD would be the biggest boost for any computer, booting into windows would be near instant after bios loads up.

Just Some Dude said:

So if I can get a Bios that supports the e8600 you think that would be a good way to go? Otherwise go with an older c2d.

Click to expand...

You'll never get the maximum potential that the E8600 has to offer from an i975x.
It can't do it.

Footnote.
Well.
It probably could but not without a couple of mods.
By the time all was said and done, it would be more time and cost effective to just buy a current motherboard.
Just my 2 cents.