Will this set up work?

[yamatosoul]

(06-09-2009 08:00 PM)robthebloke Wrote:  1) The D0 stepping is newer, and uses a *lot* less power. Since it uses less power, it generates less heat, and as a result makes it much easier to overclock You can get a C0 to about 3.8Ghz, whereas the D0 should hit 4.6Ghz without exceeding the maximum CPU voltage (though running it over 4.0Ghz makes no sense).

2) It's the new memory standard to replace DDR2. The advantage is speed. Standard DDR2 is about 800Mhz, vs 1600Mhz for the DDR3 modules. DDR2 can run in dual channel (which effectively doubles the speed to 1600Mhz in a standard system). DDR3 can be run in triple channel which gives you an effective memory speed of 4800Mhz. (That's mainly why you see packs of 3xDDR3 memory). On the Core2 Quads it's actually fairly easy to hit the maximum memory throughput, at which point the CPU performance drops to the speed at which it can be fed data from memory. Since the i7 is effectively double the number of cores (using hyper-threading) and is a hell of a lot faster, it needs significantly faster memory...

Everything is slowly moving to DDR3, you can even buy Core2 motherboards with DDR3 support (though it apparently slows them down). The new core i5's should be out later this year which will replace the Core2 line completely - again with DDR3. (The i5 won't be as good as the i7 so no fear there, however they will be dropping the i7 920 and 940 to make the cheapest i7's about £400 or so).

robthebloke, that was an awesome explanation! I'm glad I read up on this stuff because I was able to understand everything you wrote. Thank you very much!