Upgrade system ram from DDR2 to DDR5 big difference?

[Frostmourne]

1) Your CPU is a bottleneck

2) Every system needs balance - see below

3) Don't overclock unless you have an effcient cooling setup

Here is the rig I built:

http://www.sevenforums.com/gaming/46227-excellent-gaming-performance-7-a.html

I change anything, it's out of wack. So a new 5870 would require a quad to push it etc.

The only overclocking I would have done is using the built in ATI Tool.. they say this is safe and does not require extra cooling.. it just uses the built in fan on the card. The fan is made to handle overclocking of this type.

I have read about some hard core manual overclocking procedures but never felt the need to try it. So I can understand why you say changing anything in your rig would throw it out of whack.

Out of the CPU's listed.. which one would you recommend?

Oh, BTW folks.. I just wanted a better card.. all my games even new ones from this year and last year ran great with the ATI 2600 HD Pro 512 card... With the new card, I figure I should be able to take advantage of all the settings on very high and better pixel shaders etc.. With the 512 card, I ran all my games on medium settings.

The new card won't push games to very high @ 1920x1080, for your motherboard the best option would be a Core 2 Duo E8500 - good clock speed, good cache, great architecture. Basically, I have the AMD version of it on my rig. Games will not need quad core yet, probably not next year even. By quad I mean the best performance. So far, dual-core is good.