Spazmogen wrote:Update & new question.
System has been built for 2 weeks and stable as well.
Question: do games/softwre see a Core 2 Duo as faster than the stock cpu speed? Mine is 2.13ghz per core. Core 2 Duo has 2 cores on the cpu of course.
I'm trying to figure out if its going to be outdated soon. Some games BF2 have a 1.7ghz minimum processor speed now.
That CPU speed spec is misleading.
Considering how butt-slow the 1.7GHz P4 was, you'd need that minimum, and the devs need to tell purchasers some kind of minimum. Most 1.7GHz P4 processors are 256k cache variants (IIRC the earlier Socket 423 Willamette Celeron P4's might be 128k) with a limited 400MHz FSB, and many at that point were based on RDRAM or SDRAM. In contrast, Athlon XP processors of that time already used DDR SRAM, and didn't have to deal with the P4's problem of deep pipelines that meant you really suffered if you had an L2 cache-miss (combined with the P4 not having enough cache in its initial designs to limit cache misses). Most Northwood core P4's stepped up to 512k of cache, mainboards transitioned to DDR, and soon after that, Northwood CPU's went to a 533FSB, fixing the most glaring flaws in the P4 architecture. Most Northwood P4's sold were 2.0GHz and higher (though there are some slower ones out there), and 533FSB models began at 2.26GHz.
Sounds to me like their minimum specs are based on Intel, not AMD hardware. Furthermore, the Core 2 Duo blows every Intel processor before it away, because Intel finally decided to design based on instructions-per-clock like AMD, not maximum clockspeed. Not many games are dual-core aware yet, but as time goes by, more will be. I don't think you have anything to worry about. Your system's faster than the one in my sig, and there's nothing I can't run.
P.S. At some point, GPU becomes much more important than CPU, so there's a lot of balance going on there as well.
I'm more fond of Asus boards as well, therefore I too suggest P5B Deluxe.
These small fans tend to fail very fast, besides they are damn noisy. 
