A little upgrade advice needed....

Barno · 17 May 2011 at 16:55

Hi, I was wondering if someone could give me a bit of upgrade advice for my gaming rig.

I am currently running an overclocked E6600 and I'd like to upgrade to either a Phenom II 555 BE and have a go at unlocking the cores or a Athlon x3 450 and just overclock it a little.

I would ideally like to get a motherboard that supported AM2+ and DDR2 as I have a Titan Fenrir cooler which I don't think will fit AM3 and I also have 4GB DDR2. Also looking to keep the price relatively low.

Regarding motherboards I was thinking:

If I go Phenom:
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MB-028-AK

or

If I go Athlon x3:
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MB-241-GI

I just need cpu/mobo for the time being.

Any advice would be great. Thanks.

hybrid572 · 17 May 2011 at 17:27

I'd do neither- buy a second hand G0 stepping Q6600 (or better) and overclock that. The Phenom and the Athlon are worse than the E6600 if they don't unlock, and a Q6600 is still better if they do- even s775 processors have better IPCs than AMD's current offerings.

Also means you don't have to work with a motherboard made from shoelaces and bubblegum.

Barno · 17 May 2011 at 18:10

Good advice mate. I had considered looking for a second hand Q6600, just thought the Phenom would be a bit better.

hybrid572 · 17 May 2011 at 22:25

The Phenom's certainly worth a look in, but AAT's benchmarks put the FPS of a PII X4 940 at less than 20% over a Q6600, with some games having ~10% difference and some basically being negligible. That's a poor show for the Phenom, as it's clocked 25% higher.

This means at stock, the Phenom would thrash the C2Q (although only if you got all 4 cores going), but as the Q6600 often sees overclocks as impressive as 67%, and Phenoms rarely see much more than ~20-30%, you're far better with the Q.

Of course, a Q9 series would be best.