So... if you were to get the 2.67GHz Conroe and overclock it to 3.16GHz, would you still not notice the difference? Seems you've either changed your stance on overclocking or you slipped up, contradicting your past statements on the subject.
Although Jakg may not be 100% informed all the time, he's right about you. Stop talking out of your ass.
You'd notice the difference (perhaps), but would it be worth the cash?
If I upgraded your PC's memory from memory with 5-5-5-15 timings to stuff with 4-4-4-12 timings, would your PC be faster? Yes. Would it be noticably faster? Probably not (unless you used a RAM instensive app). Would it be worth doing for a subtle improvement if you could do it for free with 5 mins of tweaking? I'd say so. Would it be worth selling what you have now, incurring a depreciation loss, and then buying new stuff? Hell no!
From what the prices are (Here, at least), I'd say the E8400 is the best bang for the buck. The E7200 is like the E2xxx series, small L2 cache that hinders performance a good bit.
The fact it is easy can be seen when I helped a friend open her case, work out what HDD type she has, go to the store, buy a new one, and install it all over text messaging, but she really wants to learn how to build computers and all that jazz, so she has to balls to try it, purely because if anything goes wrong she knows I'll save the day.
Yet at the same time I know people at uni who were too scared to install RAM, HDDs, DVD+_RW, hell he was even too scared to install a new case fan. To him computers are some scary complex creature, and despite my urging for him to try and replace some parts himself I get asked to go round and do it.
It has nothing to do with knowledge of how they work, it is if you have the balls to try it. Unfortunately a lot of people do not.
It really pisses me off when people get that wrong, it makes me want to punch a baby in the face, or when TV programs have improbable computer problems like on Grey's Anatomy, some how, a power cable magically jumped out of the HDD as it was running, and then magically after hitting the idiot button, everything was how it was before the magical cable jumped out.
lol, i can't believe i bought an e8400. I'm running it at stock speeds now. overclocked it can hit 4ghz on air or higher. the e8600 is supposed to be able to overclock higher, I'm not sure how high though. I was thinking of picking up an aftermarket cpu fan/heatsink in a few weeks.
AMD has released some new motherboards that are supposed to be better for overclocking. Intel Nehalem cpu's benchmarks should be popping up today or maybe later this week.
O/T:
Incorrect. The LFS Forum as it is known today went public on August 11th, 2005. The old forum still exists at RSC.net, and there you can see posts relating to LFS all the way back to late 2002.