Processor buying decision?

I also think going with the bigger bus is the best choice. While it does matter what you will be using it for, you can never tell what the future may hold. Having the capability to do bigger and more powerful tasks and actions will often lead to actually taking up something new and fun to do, such as video editing which requires both a powerful processor and higher amounts of RAM.

I also encourage you to increase your RAM from that one Gigabyte you currently have installed to two Gigabytes. It will increase over all speed and power of your system and compliment your new processor. Both are very easy to upgrade, just be sure to purchase the right RAM for your system. You can go the the Crucial website to find out exactly what type of memory your system requires. Go here:

http://www.crucial.com/

This is a great website and can be trusted. It will do a scan of your systems and tell you what type of memory you need. It also offers to sell you memory, but you are not obligated to do so.

Good luck and have a nice day.

P.S. Please note that a Windows X32 system can hold up to four Gigabytes of RAM. However, even though you can install up to four Gigabytes, the system is incapalbe of actually utilizing that much RAM. While you will not see any degradation of performance, you will also wast about 512MB of the RAM. Most retailers, including Microsoft, will not outright explain this issue. There is a single Knowledge Base article which explains that the upper memory cells of that last Gigabyte of RAM is withheld for use of the system, but never actually uses it. So, when you go to view the system RAM in the System Information dialog box, you will see less than four Gigabytes reported, even though when you view System Information via the Run box, and type in msinfo32 and click OK, it will show the full amount of physical RAM installed and report the full four Gigabytes.

My husband and I played around with adding RAM modules and discovered this mystery of the dissapearing RAM. When we installed four one Gig sticks, the System Info via Control Panel showed an amount of missing RAM. When we installed three one Gig sticks, it reported all three Gigs. So, I contacted our systems manufactures, Dell and HP, and they hemmed and hawed about this issue, never giving us a full and complete answer as to why this RAM was missing. We also went to several Electronics stores and had different reasons given to us, one major one was that our video card utilized this missing RAM, which is false. Finally, after searching the Knowledge Base I found that article, and it explained that those top RAM Cells in that upper 512 Megabyte space is "reserved" and so it is unusable by the system!

I currently have four Gigabytes installed in my Dell system, and paid a premium for that "upgraded" amount of memory when I purchased this system. I needed a powerfull machine for both video editing and CAD applications. Dell did not provide the information that a large portion of the memory they were selling me would be wasted, and therefore the money I spent was wasted as well. We currently have three Gigabytes installed in our HP system and it runs just as well as the Dell.

Bottom line: Do not install more than three Gigabytes into a X32 system. Now, the X64 can handle as much as eight Gigabytes of installed RAM and utilize every bit of it. However, while the future will be the X64 machines, currently there simply isn't enough compatible hardware/software to run on it. Until there is more support via hardware and software I will stick with my X32 machines. In a couple of years we will see more X64 being sold and then we can have some pretty darn powerfull machines! Way cool.

Depends on what you'll use it for. I think you might just want to switch out to a new board so you can get more RAM.

I like the bigger bus(1333).