Q6600 + 4 or 8GB RAM

[THE JEW (RaVeN)]

With that many GB's, I might start considering ECC ram if I was at all concerned with data integrity. For a gaming system, it's irrelevant. For a workstation, it's almost mandatory.

Vista "flaking out" may very well be caused by ECC errors with that much RAM.

EDIT:

To give you a rough idea on how many "soft" errors you'll expect:

Q: Come on... cosmic rays? Really, how often does this occur?

A: The Ram Guy consulted with some experts on this one. Basically, it's a statistics problem. But, when you do the math, a soft error is likely to occur in a system with 256 Mbytes of memory about every 750 hours! And, the more memory you have, the more frequently soft errors will occur.

Q: Is that such a big deal?

A: You tell me. At two hours a day, 750 hours is once a year. Probably no big deal. But, at twenty-four hours a day, it's a month. That's not sounding so good, now...

If you're emailing and word processing, a crash is an inconvenience. If you're serving web pages, a crash can be disastrous! It's really up to you...

http://www.asktheramguy.com/v3/showthread.php?t=38141

So once a month with 24 hr usage with 256mb of RAM. So times that by 32 (4 X 256mb X 8 gb) for your 8gb and you're looking at a potential error every day in a month.