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3930K V Q9550 real world comparisons

Pooh

Pooh

Pooh

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22 Oct 2006
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Now that I've had some time to get used to the 3930K I thought it would be useful to post some real life comparisons against the Q9550

The Q9550 was running at 3.5 with 8GB Ram and the 3930K at 4.5 with 32GB RAM. OK so it's not a like for like comparison but it's how I plan to run the 3930k 24/7. I ran the Q9550 at 3.5 24/7.

I have been able to get the 3930K to 5.0 and the temps are not too bad thanks to the water cooling but I'm not comfortable with pushing high volts 24/7. I can get stable 4.5 with 1.31V

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Don't suppose you did any Gaming benchmarks with your Q9550 to see if the newer X79 and 3930K has much advantage?
 
Sorry no - not really into games, just the video & photo work.

I wouldn't image it would be worth it for games, a good 2700K should be more than enough.
 
I like the X79 motherboards though as Crossfire is x16 by x16, That's why I was wondering how your setup would compare. Or maybe I should wait and see if a new motherboard comes out for i5 which supports x16 by x16 as I'm in no rush atm.
 
1uke said:
I like the X79 motherboards though as Crossfire is x16 by x16, That's why I was wondering how your setup would compare. Or maybe I should wait and see if a new motherboard comes out for i5 which supports x16 by x16 as I'm in no rush atm.
Click to expand...

I assume you mean the i5 Sandy Bridge?

There are motherboards which support x16/x16 but they rely on an Nvidia NF200 chip to provide the extra lanes.

No Sandy Bridge board will be able to do x16/x16 natively as the chipset doesn't provide enough PCI-E lanes.

FYI there's only a very small reduction in performance at x8/x8 compared to x16/x16.
 
@ Pooh

What motherboard are you using and what settings are you using for your 24/7 clocks, I have a 3930K in a ASUS Rampage IV Extreme, I need a bit more juice for 4.5 than you but not much.
 
Surveyor said:
I assume you mean the i5 Sandy Bridge?

There are motherboards which support x16/x16 but they rely on an Nvidia NF200 chip to provide the extra lanes.

No Sandy Bridge board will be able to do x16/x16 natively as the chipset doesn't provide enough PCI-E lanes.

FYI there's only a very small reduction in performance at x8/x8 compared to x16/x16.
Click to expand...

I heard it could be up to as much as a 15% gain using x16/x16 especially I'm guessing with the new Higher end 7 series cards due out soon. Not sure how right that is as I have obviously not tested it myself.
 
moogle said:
Nice comparison. I'd have thought it'd be much faster with more cores and a higher overclock.
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I was watching task manager when it was doing the premier work and all the cores were nowhere maxed out as opposed to the Q9550 which was running flat out. Not sure why Premier prois not maxing them out....

At the end of the day it's 28% bump in clock speed from 3.5 to 4.5 and a 50% increase in cores from 4 to 6 ( ok 12 if you count hyperthreading ) which has resulted in more than halving the time to output the files. I'm a happy bunny.
 
Pooh said:
I was watching task manager when it was doing the premier work and all the cores were nowhere maxed out as opposed to the Q9550 which was running flat out. Not sure why Premier prois not maxing them out....
Click to expand...

Ah well that shoulda been said. Maybe premier isn't getting data fast enough to process it. Would be nice to see what the results are on 100% utilization :)
 
N00bbuilder79 said:
@ Pooh

What motherboard are you using and what settings are you using for your 24/7 clocks, I have a 3930K in a ASUS Rampage IV Extreme, I need a bit more juice for 4.5 than you but not much.
Click to expand...

Im using a Asus P9X79 PRO Intel X79 (Socket 2011) DDR3 Motherboard

Have to say I'm really impressed with the BIOS options.

I'm running 100 BCLK with a 45 multiplier and 1.31V
there are so many options and sub options I wouldn't know where to begin. It's a bit like drinking from a firehose just now trying to figure out the permutations.

The board does a really good job of auto overclocking but it pushes some scary volts as it does so. I onece let it auto volt at 5.0 and CPUid showed 1.56V Vcore :eek:

Once I get above 4.5 the volts tend to increase. I can get to 4.85 with 1.4 but it does tend to send temps into low 60's when priming. A bit too hot for 24/7 on a £480 cpu

The RAM is behaving nicely at 1866mhz

Hope this helps
 
1uke said:
I heard it could be up to as much as a 15% gain using x16/x16 especially I'm guessing with the new Higher end 7 series cards due out soon. Not sure how right that is as I have obviously not tested it myself.
Click to expand...

15% gain? Where did you hear that?

HardOCP did a big write up on PCI-e bandwidth using GTX480 SLI and Surround resolutions (in other words saturating the PCI-e bus as much as possible with data). Only at 4x did the framerates start to drop off, even then it was a relatively minimal drop. 8x/8x and 16x/16x were basically identical.

The new 7 series cards might need the extra bandwidth but given all the testing that has been done on current generation cards it is unlikley in normal use scenarios.
 
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