Verified answer

Here's the Asus P5RC-LE,(Altair),mobo spec's, and layout diagram from HP.com.http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?docnam... Apparently this is a mobo built for HP by Asus,(pretty common). It shows the list of supported processors. Pentium D 800 series Dual Core being one of them. Keyword here is Pentium D. Your Pentium Extreme 840 came in three 'flavors'. http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/310/2 The SL8FK has the Hyperthreading technology, the other two listed do not. The Northbridge chipset on the Asus mobo, has a ATI Radeon Xpress 200 for Intel on it,(ATI RC 410). See spec's, here on a page from Wikipedia.org:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_ATI_Chi... (Under, For Intel Processors) (RC410) Shows it supports Pentium 4/Core2 Duo. A Pentium Extreme is essentially two Extreme Pentium 4's on a single die, accessed by Hyperthreading Technology. http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/140 (read through all 5 pages) Also look at Intel.com's spec's: http://www.intel.com/products/processor_number/cha... Your Northbridge chipset run's the editions of Pentium D processors, which do not have Hyperthreading Technology,(if they did the BIOS would see them as having four cores) Which leads me to believe your chipset does not have Hyperthreading support. Which leads me to believe it would not support the Pentium Extreme Edtion 840. http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/310 From this architecture, we can see the Core2 Duo doesn't use Hyperthreading Technology: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Core_2 Hyperthreading went out a long time ago, for good reason. There's no reason to have a 'virtual' core if it's really there! These are just my thoughts! Could be all wrong! I think you should post this question in Hardwaresecrets.com's forum, or Sysopt.com/forum, or Tomshardware.com. These guy's probably got one of these chips,(Pentium Extreme Edition 840), to test back in 2005,and could tell you exactly.(granted it's a 775 socket chip, but if it's the wrong voltage......Poof! http://www.hothardware.com/articles/Intel_Pentium_... (voltage) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Pentium... (voltage) Hmmmm, it's the same requirements! 1.25 to 1.4

It's a Blizzard game. It runs on almost anything, because they're almost the only game studio that does proper optimization nowadays. (DICE does aswell, but they're awfully buggy on release). Please do not listen to the others on this portion, especially those who could claim your HDD is somehow bottlenecking performance. They work on assumption, i'm actually a professional when it comes to building and maintaining computer systems, and knowing how they work with all sorts of programs, games included. So no, apart from possibly upgrading that CPU to an intel CPU(let's face it, AMD's behind right now, by a large margin), you don't really need an upgrade. Cheap/expensive ram makes no difference nowadays any more, and overclocking the ram is pointless. Hard drive doesn't bottleneck the performance in anything but where it's used heavily, for instance, loading screens. There is naught wrong with GTX260. No reason to upgrade. As long as it's Asus, cheap or expensive doesn't matter when speaking of a motherboard.