Poker rig, Quad Core build
 

Ok, upgraded my old system. I use it for Photoshop and Illustrator heavily, and play poker. No real gaming or anything.

Went from a 3GHz P4 to the Q6600 quad core. New motherboard obv, so I replaced my AGP vid card to a new PCI-Express and so on.

Thing is, I have 2 gigs on DDR-400 ram I wanted to keep to stay in budget - I bought new drives and monitor and so on already. This board supports this DDR rather than DDR2, and it was cheap, so I can ease into my upgrade (board was $45).

Eventually, of course, I'll get a new board and load it up with a lot more of the memory. Maybe give Vista a year to sort out it's issues, whatever.

1) How big a dropoff can I expect using this memory with a new 4-core? Enough to care? When I make the switch to DDR2 will I even notice?

2) The front side bus is 1066 on this CPU, but a lot of people are using DDR2 800 memeory with it. I can't figure out why they wouldn't use DDR 1066 - shouldn't the FSB of the memory match that of the CPU?

Any input is appreciated.

Re: Poker rig, Quad Core build
 

Memory speed should match the FSB for optimal performance but otherwise the FSB will "slow" for the memory.

You will probably not notice unless you are doing some multilayered giant TIFF editing job with 50 filters etc etc.

If you give Vista a year, you might as well wait another and maybe get Windows "7" in '09 instead.


Vista be damned. XP ftw

Re: Poker rig, Quad Core build
 

I am not a memory expert, but I would think you would notice it (the diff between DDR400 and DDR2800) in any memory intensive tasks, including PT uploads and HUD updates.

The difference between 1066 and 800, I don't know. tomshardware forum may help you.