Rather than getting the Q9450 just pay a little more and get the Q9550. It's down to $330 just about everywhere and Fry's just had it on sale for $299.

Core 2 Quad prices are dropping now that Intel's next chip is getting close to release.

Garrett

I'm running a Q6700 at 3.2Ghz at 1.5v (I need that much to keep it stable when I crunch with a SETI @ home optimized app). Render times for PSP sized H.264 MP4s were insane...

AMD Turion 64 ML-32=Near Real time (22mins takes +-22mins)
Quad Q6700 @ 3.2Ghz= 22mins takes 4-5 mins.

I was on a FSB speed of 400x8 but resorted to 320x10 at the same voltage since I think the FSB doesn't like to be OCed as much (only goes up to 1333mhz officially), this was because on that FSB speed, after a long time number crunching with SETI, it always freezes upon boot-up of Vista if the power is still fed to the motherboard (a ASUS P5K-VM mATX board) for a while after being shut down after a long crunching period. I hope the FSB is the answer to this mystery.

Nope, froze on Vista bootup again today even after several successful bootups over the past 6 days on the lower FSB speed. I'm stumped. Anyone interested can follow my thread on the SETI @ home Forums. Search for "Overclocking newbie to Q6700 to 3.2Ghz and a ASUS P5K-VM Mobo".