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Any advice on E4400 replacement....please?

si_

si_

si_

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Hi,

I always find this part of the forums very interesting and extremely useful so I thought I would post my first question so please be gentle if I have not put it in the right way etc.

Anyway I am in the process of building a replacement pc for my dad who will be using it mainly for his photography. He currently uses Photoshop Elements to alter/amend his raw images, scans negatives onto it and soon he will be using it to edit (basic editing) HD video.

At the moment he is using a 3 year old ASRock motherboard and an E4400 which I overclocked to 2.6ghz together with 3gb of RAM and a 750Gb drive.

I will be putting Windows 7 (32-bit most probably unless Photoshop Elements will definitely run on 64-bit) onto the new pc with his old pc still using XP just so he can get used to the new Windows 7 gui.

I have my old E6600 (which I had overclocked to 3.15ghz for 3 years) spare and am wondering whether this, together with a newer motherboard would provide a substantial improvement from his E4400.

Alternatively I am wondering whether an E5300, overclocked, would provide a better level of performance?

I am thinking that perhaps the E6600 at 3ghz would be similar in performance to the overclocked E5300 but am not sure.

The maximum cost for motherboard and cpu would be around £120 so would still be looking at Core 2 Duo architecture.

Am also aware that perhaps an SSD or a RAID10 type drive setup may assist with his image processing but budget will not stretch to that and I already have a 1Tb Samsung F3 drive ready to go. Also hoping the newer motherboard would provide better/more stable IO than the much older and cheaper ASRock mb.

Any advice welcome and appreciated.

Forgot to say - sorry for the really long post and thanks for reading!

Thanks

si_
 
For Intel dual cores have a look at my cpu comparison thread here. E2000/4000/5000/6000/8000 series dual cores extensively benched at various speeds.

For editing though a quad would be best. You can get a Q6600 second hand for less than £90.
 
Hi Pasty,

Yes I had a read of that lastnight (typically just after I posted this question!).

Really great report you put together - I certainly appreciated the work that went into compilling it.

I think even the £90 for a quad is too much for my dad but will probably stick with him using the E6600 overclocked at about 3ghz........he can use my q9550 when I change up to i7 :)

Thanks

si_
 
The E6600 is still a very good cpu. I only swapped mine out in Feb-March. Hit 3.8Ghz no problem. If you have one lying around you might as well make use of it. 4mb of cache too!!
 
Photoshop elements 2 is running fine on my PC under Win7 64bit. I had to increase the page file size to get it to run.
I imagine later versions wouldn't even need this change.
 
Mind made up - E6600 it is then.

Also thanks Quixote as was wondering whether Photoshop Elements runs under 64-bit Windows - still not sure it would utilise the extra memory but it is a start.
 
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