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I don't recall which MB I have as I can't find the original boxes from last year, so I looked up the stats on the CPU (E6850) and using that as a basis it looks like anything with a 775 socket and 65 nm manufacturing will work, including the 6600 you recommended ($190 on newegg) - Basically, upgrading to that and buying a new set of 8gb ram (goes to show how things change, last year 4gb was "overkill") will run a mear $300 and I can upgrade my wife's machine to 8gb as well.
Irony here, the processesor I currently have is still selling for $200 on newegg, go figure... at the time the quads were just way too expensive.
Thanks for the help!
-Clovis (Clovian / Clovina)
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keep in mind xp or vista32 will only "see" 4gb (and really only 3GB I believe with most video cards), you need vista64 for 8gb. Also make sure you are decent with CPUs, frankly I'd rather just spend the $100 on a new motherboard than try to extract my CPU from my current mobo -- I have pulling out the heatsink without breaking it, pulling out the chip without busting it, making sure theres no dust anywhere, etc.
also live.com has cashback on ebay purchases, you may actually find a quad core w/ mobo on ebay cheaper with 20-25% cashback.
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Update, I found some of the original manuals - I have an abit IP35 Pro MB - as far as if it supports 45nm or not, I'm still working on that - their site and support forums are currently down.
To upgrade to vista 64 unfortnately will cost another $120 to re-buy the damn OEM version (as I have an OEM, not retail version of vista currently... and in that case if you want to change from 32 to 64 or visa versa it requires buying both sets seperately... thank you microsot).
