I just noticed something about that card, well problem is I use the S/PDIF for my surround sound (optical, it also has one coaxial cable input in to decoder box).

Everything goes to do decoder through one optical cable then goes through a GS Cable to the Bass speaker, which then goes to all the other speakers (confused, so am I.. not very good with sentence structure )

Basically, question is, can I use my current surround sound with that card?

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by the time the ati dx10 cards arrive, the nvidia 8800 series will become cheaper as they will probably release an 8900 to reach the ati one's speed


and i was going to buy the zalman you linked to aswell



also the 4mb lvl2 cache of the 6600 is far better than the 2mb of the 6400

should really make a difference

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The banhammer thirsts for tards | There is no 'overkill'. There is only 'open fire' and 'I need to reload'.

not really there is a link i posted here about very little difference between an overclocked 6300 and a 6800 at the same speed.

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i always thought it made quite a difference as that's the fastest piece of memory in the pc (apart from lvl 1 cache) so the cpu would be able to store more commonly used calculations and so up the speed ..

(the speed of the cpu wouldn't be completely used as it has to wait for the slow ram to send stuff to the cpu instead of being able to get it from the cache again)

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The banhammer thirsts for tards | There is no 'overkill'. There is only 'open fire' and 'I need to reload'.

I completely thought the same, but I was reading somewhere (think it was wiki) that overclocking it to the same speed shows little or no difference compared to the higher amount of Cache, but having it as an overhead is always nice I guess.

I was also reading that higher frequency RAM can have a negative effect on the CPU (400Mhz maybe more efficient than the 633MHz, but you only get a difference with the PC6300, either way it is apparently barely noticeable). Maybe it'd be a better idea to chuck the money into an E6400 buy a Zalman Aero with the extra 50~70 quid and chuck the rest onto a better GFX card. After all... CPU isn't the letdown so much now with games etc, it's the GFX Card right...? You only really use high amounts of CPU power when performing high calculations which is usually when not playing a game, lol.

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My 6300 is now sitting happy at 366x7 = 2.56Ghz, temps are fine with the Zalman CNPS9700 LED . Memory is unlinked so its running at a steady 800MHz.

Very happy with the cheaper chip and have got 700Mhz for free with minimal trouble.

** disclaimer overclock at your own risk **

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Sweet overclock. Also, when you link the DDR (presumably you mean they are both in the same channel or linking is disabled in BIOS or something <noob here with DDR channels>) how does it work? I thought it would constantly run both RAM chips at 800MHz whether they we're linked or not. o.o

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Linking the memory speed to the FSB so if you increase the FSB the memory increases accordingly.

If they are unlinked then you can raise or lower them independately.

Honestly this was very easy with my motherboard, an nvidia 650i based board. My only worry is the Northbridge temperature as the heatsink is hot to touch but this seems to be a problem with intel 965 boards as well.

There is a lot of headroom but I think ill leave it here as it shouldn't reduce the life of the chip and it performs great at this speed.

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May need to ask some help with OC on processors, I know you can overclock GPUs easily using software etc. >.>

Also, if I do look into Overclocking with a P965 chip, would you recommend getting extra cooling?

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erm.....................................

no

is it an active sub?

other than that i would have thought you could just plug the speakers directly into the card and still have surround sound (although i could be wrong)

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m
mmmmYou sir, are a swaggering addlepated jackanapes!
m

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