It all depends on your Mobo. I am using an Asus P2B-DS with the 100 mhz bus so. It does not allow overclocking so all that I had to do was plug in the processors and it did the rest. But then Asus is renown for making great motherboards. I have an incredibly fast and stable system as well so I cannot complain at all. If you are running a good motherboard, I think Asus, Soyo, Abit, then you should not have a problem with the upgrade. Just make sure your mobo supports the bus speed. You know the newer intels come in 133 and 100 mhz bus speeds. I am still not that hip on the AMD dual processor system as I hear there are alot of stability and chipset issues, however the AMD alone is great. I am not a tech head so I cannot tell you much but I have a very fast a stable system which cruches polygons as though they were not there. I do suffer speed decreases when I get around 250,00+ polygons. I also net render which is pretty fast. I am too afraid to try internet rendering yet as I don't have broadband. I won't run anything but NT and Linux. I don't like the 95/98 series of OS's so that also says alot about why I have a stable system. Also ECC memory is well worth the extra that you pay for it. So when I talk about ram, I wont do anything but ECC.