Amd X2 or Conroe? What handles picture files better, this will be for photo processing and games.

I just put a e6600 core 2 duo system together for my son and boy does that thing overclock well, tried some photoshop work with it and definitely faster than my Athlon 2500. I have never tried a fast amd64 x2 though, most of the benchmarks show the Core 2 Duo to have the advantage but what is the hands on experience?

Here is what I am looking at.

Core 2 Duo E6600
4 gigs ram
Asus P5b Deluxe MB
Raptor 150 gig 16mb cache
eVga 7900 GTO nvidia graphics
I have a couple of 320 gig hard drive that I will put into it also.

I have a Core 2 Duo E6400 with an ASUS P5W DH Deluxe motherboard. It's excellent. It beats the Athlon X2 4600+ I had briefly (gave it up becuase of the terrible stability issues) and it runs ten degrees cooler. Make sure the Socket 775 board you get has the Intel 975X chipset, as 975X will be compatible with Core 2 Quad processors coming out in January-ish 2007.


Alex