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Advice replacing a 4 year old CPU

the_director said:
Just wanted to chip in to say that I have a Q6600 and I was just about to change it for a i5 2500k or i7 2600k for about £1,000 (almost completely new system build).

However, I just sat myself down, looked at the way I used my PC and really thought: do I really need it?
Click to expand...

I've just got rid of my Q6600/775 hardware & the £150 I made is going towards a SB set up. £400 will get me a 2500k, some decent RAM & a good board.

I'll have a nice fast system for a good few years now. Glad I took the plunge & decided to offload my old hardware while I could still get a few quid for it because it'll be practically worthless before long.
 
bainbridge said:
I've just got rid of my Q6600/775 hardware & the £150 I made is going towards a SB set up. £400 will get me a 2500k, some decent RAM & a good board.

I'll have a nice fast system for a good few years now. Glad I took the plunge & decided to offload my old hardware while I could still get a few quid for it because it'll be practically worthless before long.
Click to expand...

I have also done the same.:eek:
 
Be careful which CPUs you put in that 965 chipset motherboard. I remember reading that chipset had issues with the 45nm Core 2 based CPUs, so maybe a BIOS update will allow you to use the E8xx0 series CPUs and the Q9xx0 series.

My mate's E8400 based system outperforms other people's Q6600s in Supreme Commander 2 so if your board can support it, then I reckon that will be the best to go for with current Price:Performance for those CPUs.
 
I've found my quad to be much better for gaming even though it's at a lower clock than my E8400 was. GTA IV especially makes use of all 4 cores very well.
 
bainbridge said:
I've just got rid of my Q6600/775 hardware & the £150 I made is going towards a SB set up. £400 will get me a 2500k, some decent RAM & a good board.

I'll have a nice fast system for a good few years now. Glad I took the plunge & decided to offload my old hardware while I could still get a few quid for it because it'll be practically worthless before long.
Click to expand...

It's not worthless if it is still able to play games at a good standard. Plus, looking at the prices on Ebay socket 775 parts are still attracting strong bids - I sold 4gb of OCZ DDR2 RAM for £72, which is not far short of getting 8GB of very good DDR3 RAM.

Don't get me wrong, I was very tempted to go Sandy Bridge, but if I my current system is not struggling with what I'm doing with it I can't really justify the upgrade - of course others who do a lot more with their PCs than me will find it worthwhile and an i5 2500k is staggeringly good value for money.

My issue is that I currently have a Kandalf LCS case with watercooled CPU and Northbridge and the case has no cable management and as newer CPUs need less cooling I want to get a new case at the same time which adds to the cost, so along with a decent SSD, new PSU, Motherboard, RAM, CPU, CPU cooler it adds up.

So, I have bought the SSD and PSU now, ready to go into the new build when my Q6600 can no longer do what I want it to do.
 
the_director said:
It's not worthless if it is still able to play games at a good standard. Plus, looking at the prices on Ebay socket 775 parts are still attracting strong bids - I sold 4gb of OCZ DDR2 RAM for £72, which is not far short of getting 8GB of very good DDR3 RAM.

Don't get me wrong, I was very tempted to go Sandy Bridge, but if I my current system is not struggling with what I'm doing with it I can't really justify the upgrade - of course others who do a lot more with their PCs than me will find it worthwhile and an i5 2500k is staggeringly good value for money.

My issue is that I currently have a Kandalf LCS case with watercooled CPU and Northbridge and the case has no cable management and as newer CPUs need less cooling I want to get a new case at the same time which adds to the cost, so along with a decent SSD, new PSU, Motherboard, RAM, CPU, CPU cooler it adds up.

So, I have bought the SSD and PSU now, ready to go into the new build when my Q6600 can no longer do what I want it to do.
Click to expand...

Well maybe "practically worthless" was a bit of an exaggeration, my Q6600 still ran games well but I decided to upgrade before my system started to really struggle, after all, 775 is already 3 generations old.

Like yourself I've done a few upgrades leading up to this platform change that can be carried over to my new SB system: GTX 460, Prolimatech Super Mega & a 24inch monitor. But I'm sticking with my cheap perspex case as its completely transparent & I like it :D
 
Well my plan is to save up for Ivybridge as that is sure to be superior to Bulldozer and then get myself a system that will last me a long time. Luckily my current setup was an absolute bargain on Ebay a couple of years ago so I'm not really losing money even if I eventually sell the parts for very little.

I would stick with the Kandalf case and Liquid cooling if only it cable management and properly accessible bays. Sadly, it doesn't, so I really want to change it for my next build.

I'm looking forward to seeing what impact a decent SSD will make.
 
Well I have a Q6600 sitting on my desk ready to go, but I've run into a problem.

I need to update the BIOS to version F12 (my current version is F2).
I have downloaded the file from Gigabyte but as I'm using Windows 7 64bit it won't run the programme and tells me I need a 64bit version instead.

Has anyone else had this problem and is there an easy solution or a 64bit exe? I'm also now a bit apprehensive about updating the BIOS because of all the warnings I've read while looking into it.

The website I got the file from is - http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=2314&dl=1#dl
 
Open the BIOS when you boot (Del key) and then press F8 to open QFlash. Then point it to the file you want (on a USB stick ideally) and it will flash. Very straight-frward process. Only ever flash things in windows if you have to :)
 
Under no circumstances update the bios through windows. Instead download the latest (F14 in your case) to a usb stick, reboot and use Q-Flash like andy_mk3 suggests. Install your Q6600, clear cmos and re-enter the bios to redo all of your settings.
 
Thanks for all the advice, I've noticed there are over 1800 views to this thread so it might be helping others as well.

What should be the last question (unless something goes wrong), is clearing the CMOS simply a matter of removing the battery for a few seconds or is there another/better way?
 
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Ok one last hurdle.

Q-flash doesn't recognise the USB stick. I have the option to load or save from a floppy drive which I don't have.
The stick is formated to FAT32, legacy USB support is enabled and I'm using one of the rear ports.
I've had a look online and it seems to be a common problem, most people have found that a different USB stick works but I only have two.

Have any of you had this problem before and know a way around it?
 
Not sure about that one, you may have to do some research on that, or see if you know someone who you can borrow a usb stick or floppy drove off.
 
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