A decent upgrade?

plasticmekon · 17 Nov 2007 at 21:12

Hey

I'm in the mood for an upgrade. At the mo, I've got what's in the spec in my sig abut am looking at the following to upgrade it with.

-Intel Core 2 Quad Pro Q6600 "Energy Efficient SLACR 95W Edition" 2.40GHz
-Asus P5K-E WiFi Intel P35 (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard
-Arctic Silver 5 Thermal Compound (3.5g)
-Arctic Cooling Accelero S1 VGA Cooler
-Akasa AK-184-L2B Amber Ultra Quiet 92mm Fan - 3 pin (for the S1)
-BFG GeForce 8800 GT OC 512MB GDDR3 HDTV/Dual DVI (PCI-Express)

At the mo I've got a Zalman 9500 cooler, a Hiper Type-R 580W PSU and 2x 1GB OCZ Reaper HPC PC2-8500 RAM sitting inside an Antec P180 case which will be used in the new build. Planning on Vista Home Premium 32.

Clearly given the oc on my currrent chip I am in the mood for this sort of thing on the new CPU. Have heard the Q6600s go quite nicely up to 3gig on air?

Any thoughts from anyone? I'm really hoping that this will be quite a significant upgrade from what I've got at the mo but I cant really be sure as I'm not sure where my current chip at it's current speed sits in the grand scheme of things..

Yiuca · 17 Nov 2007 at 21:30

Q6600 can reportedly reach 3.6Ghz on air with abit of pushing 3Ghz on stock voltage & then slowly upwards so usually between 3.2-3.6Ghz is the usual... I personally think Vista 64 bit & an extra 2GB of RAM will secure you for future... Contrary to believe support for 64 bit Vista is decent... 4GB of RAM in Vista ups performance by a lot & can be fully displayed & utilized in Vista 64.

A sound card will help bring more performance mainly in games if you do any gaming, a soundcard takes off some extra stress from the CPU which can help improve some performance, to which they offer better sound anyway, Creative X-Fi Extreme Gamer or Music cards are around £50-60... That is optional obviously.

If you want an idea of the performance gain well it's a lot, look at this: http://www23.tomshardware.com/cpu_2007.html

Put your current Processor as 1, & select the Q6600 as the other, check out the different things & just see the performance differences!

plasticmekon · 17 Nov 2007 at 21:51

Gotcha, well I already have an Audigy 2 in the current system so that'll do. Forgot to mention it. Not so sure about Vista 64 mind you. Heard people having issues with it. I'm getting Vista 32 for nothing so I'll use that in the meantime. (yes it is a legit version too!)

Insteresting about tha RAM. I actually have a pair of PC2-8000 512Mb Crucial sticks kicking around from my last upgrade. I actually thought it made my current system a bit unstable and not any faster with the 2x 1Gb and the 2x 512s in at the same time, although that was with XP. Maybe a new board and Vista will make better use of it.

I've seen the compatison charts before but it doesn't take into account the overclock. On an article on THG, they show the 805 @ 3.8 as getting 6311 on PC Mark, which is up there with a vanilla E6600. Still - that's only one benchmark and I'll have 2 more cores to play with!

Yiuca · 17 Nov 2007 at 22:11

plasticmekon said:
Gotcha, well I already have an Audigy 2 in the current system so that'll do. Forgot to mention it. Not so sure about Vista 64 mind you. Heard people having issues with it. I'm getting Vista 32 for nothing so I'll use that in the meantime. (yes it is a legit version too!)

Insteresting about tha RAM. I actually have a pair of PC2-8000 512Mb Crucial sticks kicking around from my last upgrade. I actually thought it made my current system a bit unstable and not any faster with the 2x 1Gb and the 2x 512s in at the same time, although that was with XP. Maybe a new board and Vista will make better use of it.

I've seen the compatison charts before but it doesn't take into account the overclock. On an article on THG, they show the 805 @ 3.8 as getting 6311 on PC Mark, which is up there with a vanilla E6600. Still - that's only one benchmark and I'll have 2 more cores to play with!

Also doesn't take into account the Q6600 overclocked neither!

It's all relevent, the Core 2 architecture is much more efficient, the Pentium (including Pentium D, were & are outperformed by AMD's Athlon, yet Core 2 restored Intels lead for the 1st time in years because it is more efficient & out performs AMD)

I've had Vista 64 & it's worked pretty well so far, I've had it since it were released & sure it has the same problems all O/S seem to have when starting, but driver support & game support is much higher than it were in the past, SP1 is due out in some months I believe which will patch a lot more up I imagine, You will hear everytime a new Microsoft O/S comes out that people have had problems with it, Vista 64 more than more due to the changes it makes which require programs to run a little differently here n there... However it has improved quite a lot so far... It's not as bad as some people have made out, but it's certainly had it's fair share of problems too. Not totally bad though!

Well with 2x1GB & 2x512MB it's more my policy to stick with the same RAM modules in size, make & speed, but Dell have 3GB RAM systems with that memory setup... However given that the GB modules you say are PC8500 & the 512's are 8000, I'd recommend either not running them together at all, or make sure 100% that they are all running the same speed... The former being preferred but I guess it's personal preference & risk.