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Worth upgrading from Q9550 to an i5 2500k?

Fogel

Fogel

Fogel

Associate
Joined
26 Oct 2011
Posts
20
Hi guys,

I got a q9550 at 3.1 ghz as my mobo doesn’t allow higher OC. I am thinking of upgrading the CPU. I recently bought a 7950 however not happy with the frame rates. Games run much smoother however I still see slowdowns and stutter during intense graphic scenes etc...

I am on a tight budget so thinking of selling my q9550 with mobo and 8gb of ram and replacing with one of the OC i5 bundles..

If I sell the q9550 cpu + 8gb ram and mobo any idea how much I can get for it?
Is it even worth upgrading to an i5 or should I save up for an i7?

Thanks
 
Fogel said:
Hi guys,

I got a q9550 at 3.1 ghz as my mobo doesn’t allow higher OC. I am thinking of upgrading the CPU. I recently bought a 7950 however not happy with the frame rates. Games run much smoother however I still see slowdowns and stutter during intense graphic scenes etc...

I am on a tight budget so thinking of selling my q9550 with mobo and 8gb of ram and replacing with one of the OC i5 bundles..

If I sell the q9550 cpu + 8gb ram and mobo any idea how much I can get for it?
Is it even worth upgrading to an i5 or should I save up for an i7?

Thanks
Click to expand...

Regarding i5 or i7, get the i5. The i7 has no advantage over the i5 for playing games.
 
I use my pc mainly for gaming which is why I bought the 7950 gfx card.
anything else I can try to improve performance? already tried OC but cus of the cheap mobo cant go higher than 3.1ghz
 
I upgraded from a Q9550 at 3.4GHz to a i5, I have it currently clocked at 4.4GHz and their is a big difference between them. One game I did notice a difference was bf2, I know it's an old game. But I like to play the Ailled intent mod single player, on my Q9550 overclocked I could play on a large map with 48 bots. With my sandbridge i5 I can play with 90 bots now on the same map :D

I would not upgrade your Q9550 yet, I would get an ivybridge setup when it comes out, plus it gives you time to save up some more or get that SSD ;)
 
Hmm might be the hard drives which slowing it down now.... I have 4x750gb configured in RAID10 using on board RAID controller which is basically a cheap software controller. I will try to run a game from a JBOD sata2 drive to see if it makes a difference.
Tried playing Crysis maxed out yesterday and I could see stutter and slowdowns when fights were getting intense and during loading and auto saving. Had to revert to HIGH to get smoother game play. Same with Metro 2033 doesnt run quite well maxed out so had to lower the detail and disable Pysx.
 
I would wait for Skymont :D.


Seriously if you feel your pc is doing what you need at a pace you are happy with then it is easy to say it is not worth updating mate, but if you find your needs have outgrown the system you have then upgrade it. It's an endless circle mate with hardware updates.

I had a Q9650 before the I7-2600K and it was a great CPU even at stock and when at 4Ghz it really shined. So maybe just see if you can overclock to 3.6-4.0Ghz (maybe you will be able to find a cheap Asus P5Q-Deluxe motherboard on the members market or any good P45 chipset motherboard will be great for really stable high overclocks with that CPU you have) what you have and should last you a good while. Only reason I updated was I need more memory for the applications I use and the DDR2 prices were silly for sticks larger than 2GB. Was cheaper to update the motherboard, CPU and RAM for me than try buy larger DDR2 RAM. I also had the upgrade itch and now looking back if the DDR2 RAM was cheap I would probably have kept it but not regreting updating to Sandybridge at all it's a very fast CPU and setup and really loving it. Also remember Ivy is only a die shrunk Sandybridge and a faster onboard GPU which most of us here will never use because we use dedicated GPUs. Only advantages for IVY are lower power use maybe a little higher overclocks and the laptop and non-dedicated GPUs market get a better onbourd GPU.

If you can get a good bargain on an I5-2500K or a I7-2600K or a I7-2700K go for it and don't look back you will love the general faster setup, which feels more responsive than a 775 setup even in general use. I even thought Sandybridge CPUs/ setups are that good I purchased recently a Samsung series 7 gamer laptop and didn't even think twice about waiting for Ivybridge laptops that are around the corner.


What motherboard do you currently have by the way ? We maybe able to help you overclock it higher safely.
 
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I’m in the same situation as the OP (only mine is at 3.4) might as well hang on a month or two and see what happens when the next CPU is released (although I want to upgrade, don’t think I need to just yet)
 
My mobo is Asrock N7AD-SLI if I push my FSB higher than 377mhz it instantly locks up and either blue screens or freezes.

Would prefer to keep this cpu rather than upgrade having just spent £400 on a 7950 and a new PC case so any ideas are welcome!

Thanks!
 
I came to a conclusion that the q9550 is the bottleneck in my system... I tested Metro and Crysis in various resolutions with settings maxed out and I can see slowdowns and stutter during intense scenes. I guess if I cannot OC I will just upgrade.
)-:
 
Fogel said:
My mobo is Asrock N7AD-SLI if I push my FSB higher than 377mhz it instantly locks up and either blue screens or freezes.

Would prefer to keep this cpu rather than upgrade having just spent £400 on a 7950 and a new PC case so any ideas are welcome!

Thanks!
Click to expand...

their number of thing that can cause it to blue screen when oc. on the 775 socket you need to set the cpu,nb,sb,memory voltage you cannot have them on auto. also you need to set the memory timing manually and not auto. what cpu cooler are you using as this can also factor in as if it not cooling correctly it can cause a system lock-up.
 
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