upgrade the mother board or upgrade the RAM

Hi all. I am looking to upgrade my old desktop, which has a Quad Q6600 CPU but only 2gb of DDR2 RAM. I am wondering whether I should upgrade the motherboard to utilize the new DDR3 RAM, which is a lot cheaper than the DDR2 apparently. The cheapest I could find on ebay is around $45 for 4GB (2X2) DDR2, which is the maximum that my current motherboard would support. I am looking to turn this into a HTPC, and I have already bought a new video card and a ceton infiniTV 4 TV tuner. Now I am wondering if I should upgrade the motherboard, and get some DDR3 RAM for cheap, or simply upgrade the current DDR2 RAM to 4GB (costs around $45). Thx.

Quote from slickdealer86 : Hi all. I am looking to upgrade my old desktop, which has a Quad Q6600 CPU but only 2gb of DDR2 RAM. I am wondering whether I should upgrade the motherboard to utilize the new DDR3 RAM, which is a lot cheaper than the DDR2 apparently. The cheapest I could find on ebay is around $45 for 4GB (2X2) DDR2, which is the maximum that my current motherboard would support. I am looking to turn this into a HTPC, and I have already bought a new video card and a ceton infiniTV 4 TV tuner. Now I am wondering if I should upgrade the motherboard, and get some DDR3 RAM for cheap, or simply upgrade the current DDR2 RAM to 4GB (costs around $45). Thx.

if you want to keep your desktop for long, then upgrade the motherboard. Of course with upgrading the motherboard you have to consider the compatible components in your current system with the new motherboard

Quote from slickdealer86 : Hi all. I am looking to upgrade my old desktop, which has a Quad Q6600 CPU but only 2gb of DDR2 RAM. I am wondering whether I should upgrade the motherboard to utilize the new DDR3 RAM, which is a lot cheaper than the DDR2 apparently. The cheapest I could find on ebay is around $45 for 4GB (2X2) DDR2, which is the maximum that my current motherboard would support. I am looking to turn this into a HTPC, and I have already bought a new video card and a ceton infiniTV 4 TV tuner. Now I am wondering if I should upgrade the motherboard, and get some DDR3 RAM for cheap, or simply upgrade the current DDR2 RAM to 4GB (costs around $45). Thx.

I dont see a strong reason to upgrade your motherboard and ram. the Q6600 is already a 5 yr old processor on a 3 or 4 gen old socket, do you ever see yourself just replacing the processor? If not just spend a little bit more for the RAM instead of spending money on new board and ram. A quick search on LGA775 boards comes out to about $50, plus another 20-40 for 4gb of RAM. Now you're spending 70-90+tax instead of $45.

get new board if you plan on upgrading your cpu

or go cheap and get the ddr2 ram instead

Do you know if you are even using all your existing RAM?
I've got 1GB Ram, but using less than half when running XP and almost all of it when running Fedora 16. I don't think adding any RAM would help me except when running Linux, and even then not much.