i just upgraded from an e8400 to a Q9550

honestly, i love my Q9550, i liked my e8400, but i love the Q9550,

it overclocks just as easily, if not better, it performs well when playing a game and running background things, like music, and i have mine overclocked to 4ghz, same speed i was running my e8400 at, here is a link to my vantage scores, i know its not a real game, but its a good comparision of performance,

3dmark Benchmark comparision

let me run some benchies, it might take a bit

here is the first one, i know, not game, but 3dmark vantage

Score Comparision dual vs quad

Score Comparision stock vs 4.1ghz

i'll continue to edit this post as i finish more benchmarks

why are you running four sticks of different sized ram

ddr3 only works in triple channel if you have a cpu that supports it, i7 is the only one that i know of that does, so having two dimms at different speeds, you cant enable dual channel, which is what you want to have it in, and the ram will always set itself to stock speeds if you have two or more sticks at different speeds or different sizes, at least from my expierience, like if you had two sticks of ddr2 800, and two sticks of ddr2 533, you wouldnt be able to overclock it, it will overclock the cpu, but the ram will remain in unlinked mode , and the two 533 would stay at that speed while th 800 ones would run at their speed

short answer, take out the two 1 gb sticks, you dont even need anything more than 4gb anyways.

so my budget is sbout 200$, maybe a little more, $250, if its a really good one.

but i would like to get one with a decent resolution, something like 1680x1050 or higher, if possible.

and widescreen would be best.

so i was looking at a few acer ones on newegg, but i havent bought a monitor before so i dont really know ehich brand is best.

thank you

well i dont know about the old sli cards, but i have never had an inkling of a problem with my cards, and on top of that, i have seen a huge performance jump in adding the second card, not double, except in vantage it was more than double in vantage. but i have not had one game crash because of my sli'ed cards, now my cpu being unstable, thats another issue entirely. but i would think that perfoormance would be better with one card that has two gpu's on it because it is basically tricking the game into thinking it's one gpu. so i can see how games that dont support sli would benefit from the single card.

Would 3x SLI'd GTX 280's be better than 2x SLI GTX295's?RFOMownage

IMO, yes, 4 GTX 260's >3 GTX 280's

How much for? ;)Bottie-1991

$200??