Alright, looking to the future, and I was going to buy the Gigabyte DS3 with an E6600 and a 7950GX2 with 2gb of pc6400 DDR2. Will the video card be bottlenecked by only having 2GB of memory, or by the CPU? Would it make more sense to only get one 7950? How would this system compare to my current AMD64 3200+ if I upgraded my 1gb of corsair XMS to 2GB and my 5900FX up to a 6800GT? Will there be much of a difference? I also do DVD authoring and encoding (mp3 mostly so far, soon making DVD masters, stuff like that) in addition to being a fairly hardcore gamer. Thanks for all the help!
Also, VISTA? What's going on with all that? Like, it will still be able to run all current 32-bit applications sufficiently, right? (IE: Adobe Post Production Package (PS, Illustrator, encore, after effects), and 3D rendering software such as Poser and Lightwave)
Firstly, I'm almost certain that running backwards compatible stuff on Vista shouldn't be too hard... It may require some patches and things like that but considering Vista has already been leaked into numerous modders hands, patches and updates (legit or not) will certainly be around for what you require of your system... Secondly, the system you noted would not have serious bottle necks... You have supplied the chip (E6600) with good RAM and a good GPU... You will also see fairly notable increases with a Conroe chip, compared to your current Athlon, in things like encoding/authoring... The Core 2 Duo chips are simply outstanding for multitasking and often excel at such programs as you have listed... One thing to note... Make sure that your case can take the length of the GX2... It is a long card! If you have a good case with plenty of space then you should be ok...
Should be quite a bit quicker. The extra CPU power and dual core should improve general performance. System wise its pretty balanced. *Slightly* CPU limited but a small overclock should resolve that.
Speaking from the experience of having the E6600 and DS3 combo your thinking of, you'll LOVE it! The only thing I can say is don't skimp on the CPU cooler or you'll regret it as this board overclocks like mad and you'll hit thermal limits long before hitting any others. Even if you choose to go only air, at least get something much beefier then the stock cooler. Overclocking on this setup is so easy that the more cooling you throw at it the further it'll let you go. I made sure to choose a heatsink fan unit that actually blows ALOT of air across the surrounding components too so that has to be helping also. For around 40 bucks or so a cheapy Gigabyte G-Power Pro let me hit a nice 3.4Ghz with more I know I can get to, but want better cooling (read: water cooling) for the life of the chip before I decide 3.6Ghz is a 24/7 running speed.
