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Getting the last bit of life out of my old dog

Chazman55

Chazman55

Chazman55

Associate
Joined
28 Jan 2012
Posts
7
Hey everyone. My PC has served me well for over 6 years now, but it's finally struggling to keep up. My CPU is a Core 2 Duo E6400 at 3.3GHz (stock is about 2.1GHz I think), 4Gb ram, and I recently got a 6870 for Skyrim and Battlefield.

Skyrim is great but battlefield is slow and stuttery on just two cores.

I can't get a whole new system for lack of funds and I really can't be bothered with having to do the clean installs that come with a new motherboard. So I'd like to get the best CPU that my motherboard will support.

Its a Gigabyte 965P DS3, revision 1.0. There's a list of supported CPUs here:

http://www.gigabyte.com/support-downloads/cpu-support-popup.aspx?pid=2314

To me it looks like the best option is a Q6600, there are loads on ebay for about £50 which is great, because I'm skint!

My real question though is how much of a performance difference am I going to see? The Q6600 has a stock speed of 2.4GHz so if I leave it at stock I'm losing a lot of clock speed over my current CPU. Does the Q6600 overclock well like the Core 2 Duos do? If I can't get the clock speed up, then for games/applications that only use one or two cores I'm actually going to be losing performance aren't I?

All input appreciated, many thanks!
 
you can over clock the q6600 so shouldnt be a problem theres 2 versions though think you want a g o revision for better overclocking
 
Last edited:
Johnnytoxic said:
Unless your video encoding, editing, or have things crunching away in the background I doubt you would notice a great difference.
Click to expand...

Was that in response to my worries about single/dual core games/apps or regarding Battlefield 3? I think battlefield 3 was designed with 4 cores in mind and dual core really doesn't cut the cheese.
 
Might be having just 4gb of ram causing games to stutter as I had the same problem and upgrading to 8gb of ram made the stuttering go away for my system.
 
FWIW I have a Q6600 and whether clocked at 2.4 or 3.0 the framerate in Battlefield 3 is unchanged. The game is highly GPU limited by all accounts. That isn't to say you won't get an improvement over dual core, I just mean don't worry that you'll need to overclock it loads.
 
The Q6600 should work out well, I just gave mine to a friend now I have a 2600. I got mine to 3.2Ghz stable using an Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro. They are well known to be good performers and yeah you want the G0 stepping version as it runs cooler and uses less power.
 
I recently went from an E4300 @ 2.7ghz to a Q6600 @ 3.3ghz and noticed a sizeable difference.
 
Could you not just get a cheap 1155 board like the MSI H61M or something and whack a Sandybridge i3-2100 in there?
 
He'd also have to buy new ram as his current would be DDR2. A convenient time to go 8gb for battlefield 3 perhaps...
 
Deehjay said:
Could you not just get a cheap 1155 board like the MSI H61M or something and whack a Sandybridge i3-2100 in there?
Click to expand...

Does changing a motherboard still require an OS reformat nowadays? I'm triple booting two instances of windows 7 and one of XP (not fussed about the XP one though), and one of those instances of windows 7 I use to earn a living so it's really not something I want to have to mess around with!

Dropping a new CPU in should be very straight forward though shouldn't it? Apart from maybe updating my motherboard BIOS in accordance with that link I put in my first post?
 
Yes you will need to re-install every OS if you change to SB.

Drop the new CPU in and overclock the balls off it :p

With a half decent cooler, any Q6600 will do over 3.2GHz no problem. Mine is at 3.6GHz and runs lovely :)
 
I noticed you had a Gigabyte P965 board. Just in case it affects you too, when I dropped a Q6600 into my Gigabyte GA-P35C-DS3R (P35 based), which had a sufficiently up to date bios (F8), my monitor would go into standby after getting to the welcome screen in Windows. But all was fine in safe mode.

Updating to the very latest bios cured this, despite the supposed changes having nothing to do with Qxxxx CPU changes (an earlier F4 bios update had supposed CPU micro code updates..).

Long and the short of it, just update to the very latest bios :)
 
If you just gaming an E8400 @ 4 Ghz would be better than a Q6600.

A Q6600 @ 3.6ghz won't be a big upgrade unless you run programs that use 4 cores, even today most games tend to use 1-2 cores.
 
Sasahara said:
If you just gaming an E8400 @ 4 Ghz would be better than a Q6600.

A Q6600 @ 3.6ghz won't be a big upgrade unless you run programs that use 4 cores, even today most games tend to use 1-2 cores.
Click to expand...

Though perhaps in terms of extending any life out of his 775 system, there's an argument for placing a Q6600 in there over an E8400.
 
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