I am in the process of purchasing memory for one of my two complete systems.

I am currently running the 970 CPU set up, it has 6 gigs of memory installed on it.

I can also run the 2600K CPU as my main computer as well, right now I can only run 4 gigs of memory on it.

One of the machines would become my main while the other would become a HTPC, so I can't steal or barrow memory from one and put in another machine. As both machines need to be up and running.

Now my question is this.

Should I put the 970 CPU as a HTPC and purchase 8 gigs of memory for the 2600K set up and use this set up as my main computer. Really and truly i am not using the full capabilities of the 970 hex CPU, and the all out frequencies I can hit on the 2600K would clearly make up for any loss of threads.

Or should I keep the 2600K CPU as a HTPC, and purchasing 6 more gigs of memory for the 970 and make it have 12 gigs of memory.

The memory I would be using would be 1600 MHz 8-8-8-24 timings, because that is what is currently installed onto both machines. So I might be able to add the 4 Gigs from the 2600K to the 8 Gigs I will be putting in it, if I choose to use it as my main.

If you had to choose what would be your choice? The core i7 970 @ 4.2 GHz, or the 2600K @ 5.1 GHz? After about 3.8 GHz both system perform nearly identical to one another in the gaming department. At least it is not much of a major difference between them, at least from what I could tell after doing extensive testing.