core2quad

[Igo kyu]

Originally Posted by Stublerone

So perhaps a little misunderstanding, but giving the initial poster advice about RAM as bottleneck is misleading, too!

How is it misleading?

He or she is talking about buying a Core2 Quad as an upgrade.

That means he or she has a motherboard with a LGA 775 socket on it. A lot of those motherboards, not all but some (particularly old ones, and if he or she has had it for years already running e.g. a Core2 Duo it will be old), take only DDR2, and the fastest DDR2 you can get is 800MHz. If he or she already has a very fast new graphics card, and a Core2 Quad, DDR2 on the motherboard will be a potentially serious bottleneck.

Spending money on a computer is a balancing act, if you buy two fast items and leave a third slow, it will be the slow one that is the bottleneck. Better to spend a little less on the first two, and upgrade the third as well. Knowing what is relatively slow is difficult, but in this case, in my opinion, DDR2 is a very serious potential brake on the system.