Hi Osiris
I was looking over the requirements of C2D's and there is one thing that came up where you may be able to save some money if you wanted to go Core2Duo over AMD. Again, there really is no reason to since AMD is a great chip but I just wanted to bring this point up.
In either case, it seems you are going to upgrade your CPU, Mobo and RAM. If the price drop really goes as expected then the lowest X2 will be able $40 less than the E4300. However, because the E4300 has a high multiplier of 9, you can actually go with really slow RAM and still have the CPU function.
To give an example, the E4300 runs at 1.8Ghz or 1800Mhz. Since the multiplier is 9, the DDR2 only has to run at 200Mhz double pumped or 400Mhz net. When I gave the example builds a while back, the RAM I was showing was DDR2 800Mhz or twice the speed necessary. So in many ways, this is overkill. Even DDR2 667 is higher than the 400mHz you need to run the E4300.
So lets say you were not going to do any extreme overclock on the processor. The Core 2 Extreme selling at around $1000 runs around 2.9 Ghz. So lets say you want a cheap PC that runs near the $1000 C2D EE. With a multiplier of 9, to get to 2.9Ghz you would need your core frequency to be about 322Mhz (a 122Mhz overclock over the base 200Mhz). Well 322Mhz fsb double pumped would be 644Mhz. So you can actually take a E4300 and overclock it to 2.9Ghz and still have the RAM run slower than 677Mhz.
In other words if you buy a E4300 and some DDR2-667 RAM, you can actually overclock it to C2D Extreme Edition speeds without overclocking your ram one single bit.
Thus if you want to go C2D and save money, you can spend a bit on the CPU and buy the cheapest DDR2 667 RAM and still overclock to C2D EE speeds without doing anything to the ram.
You can buy a 2Gb kit of DDR2 667 for as low as 140Euro or 1Gb for 69 Euro. So long as they work at the rated speed, you can take your E4300 and overclock it to insane speeds.
www.alternate.eu/html/productDetails.html?artno=IBIE8Awww.alternate.eu/html/productDetails.html?artno=IAIEVBNow the E4300 C2D is about 170Euro which is only a bit higher than in the US. So if this price similarity between the US and EU market remains, then around in May, the price may drop to about 115 EU.
www.alternate.es/html/productDetails.html?artno=HPFI47The E4300 is reputed to not overclock as well as the E6300 and is said to be limited to 3.3 - 3.6Ghz speeds (ONLY 400-700Mhz OVER THE C2D Extreme Edition!!!
HAHAHA!!!!). Ok I was going crazy there.
So overclocking to 2.9Ghz should be nothing to this CPU and is nothing to even the cheapest DDR2-667 RAM.
So taking some of the mobos available in EU.
Gigabyte S3 120 Euro
www.alternate.eu/html/productDetails.html?artno=GPEG40ASUS P5B 114 Euro
www.alternate.eu/html/productDetails.html?artno=GPEA47Both these mobo's can do mild overclocks easy.
So in the end you can build a performance rig and save on RAM cost which then you can put into your CPU cost. The E4300 lets you do that because of the high multiplier.
You can build a E4300 + 1Gb DDR2 667 + mobo for about 300Euro (assuming you don't need a power supply or other upgrades). You can then easily overclock it to C2D EE speeds.
I don't know if upgrading your PC to something that can match speeds with a Core2Duo Extreme PC (about a $1500 - $1800 PC (since we don't include a video card)) is good enough for you but I figured I would throw this option your way just for your information.
I just bought some really fast 2Gb of DDR2 RAM reputed to be able to exceed DDR2 1000 speeds and realized I am an idiot for doing this. Oh well it was cheap.