ASUS P5W DH - Problems + Fixes Thread

[Yolanda]

My question is this. What is the best upgrade I can do on this motherboard? I am definitely going to overclock and take advantage of whatever I can to achieve optimal performance. I need a step up from my E6600 @ 3.4ghz, and I am already OK spending around $400 in order to do this (Q9550 + 4gb kit is in this price range). Is it worth upping the budget to around $500 and buying a new motherboard along with the CPU and RAM? There seem to be some well priced options (Asus P5Q-E, Asus P5Q SE+, Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3R). Will these suit my needs? I have an external X-Fi sound card, one 8800GTS, and only 2 hard drives, so I really don't need many onboard features. I just need performance, OC-ability and stability. Also, for around $500 would it be possible to do i7? Would it be worth it?

Thanks

If you need gaming perfomance, you can wait a couple of weeks and buy Geforce GTX295 (about ~500-550$), with a small overclock it should be as fast as two Geforce GTX 280 in SLI mode on Nvidia mainboard with their SLI chipset, so it's about 3 times faster then 8800GTS512 and four times then older versions of 8800GTS, if you use high resolutions with antialiasing. Only this upgrade can give you such big inrease of perfomance. Quad core CPU can give you 2 times faster processing power only in special programs designed for multicore computing such as video decoding or software animation.