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Been hiding in my C2D cave for too long

krooton

krooton

krooton

Caporegime
Joined
9 May 2004
Posts
28,796
Location
Leafy outskirts of London
So could some bright and friendly people please shed any light on the following?

As per my sig, I have a competent machine.

I have always been a bang for buck upgrader, rather than a must have the newest shiniest things upgrader.

Logic tells me the next move would be to a Q9550, as the rest of my machine can remain as is, but given the new i5/i3 releases and apparent improvement in AMD's offering, might it be possible to upgrade to a newer, budget system (cpu, mobo, ram) but still see an improvement on the power my machine currently puts out?

Or is a 4Ghz E8500, and similarly clocked Q9550 still in the upper ends of power, and even heavily overclocked cheap new bits cannot compete?

I would estimate an upgrade to Q9550 costing around £60, and selling my current stuff would probably net me £160, so I guess the question is can £160 buy me something more powerful than a 4Ghz Q9550?
 
There's nothing really wrong with your system as it is. You could upgrade to a Q9550 but they are getting quite long in the tooth now.

The problem with a platform change is that you'll need a new CPU, motherboard and RAM. This is quite costly.

An i5 750 setup would be noticeably faster than what you have but would cost in the region of £350.
 
Hasn't the i5 got a rather limited upgrade path though as well now? And with sandy bridge next year isn't everything just going to change again? :confused: If you can find a cheap q9550 and overclock it high you're going to see very comparable performance to the newer more current cpus in gaming so i'm not so sure its worth a whole platform change. If moneys an issue and you want a more futurn proof system on a newer platform, you could consider AM3? Either way i think its more dependant on what you use your pc for. If its just gaming i'd probably go for an interim upgrade with a q9550 (possibly cheap second hand) and overclock the hell out of it and then see what new tech is available next year.
 
Gaming (not that I am struggling with it at the mo) and video encoding mostly.

Looks like a Q9550 in the future makes the most sense really. I do love overclocking! :D

Thanks
 
You have a very similar PC to mine. I have been thinking the same thing in the past week or two and here are my thoughts (I only game):

Obviously I have looked at the Q9550 but I am put off buying it for a few reasons:

The cost. It's £170 and I would probably need a better cooler to go with it so it would be almost £200. I use the stock cooler at the moment. I have 'watched' two E8500's auction for £80-something in the past week. So that's around £110 - £120 to upgrade.

I have read a few threads on the net of people who have gone from a 4.2GHz E8*00 to a Q9550 that they can't get past 3.5GHz. I know this is still a very good CPU it is still off-putting when most of my games only use 2 cores. Another point for me is that, if i paid out for this upgrade, it would make it much harder to justify a full upgrade in the next 12 months

I then moved onto looking at i3 and i5 reviews. I can see how the new platform is better but how much better with just games and money in mind is a matter of opinion (purely from an upgrade point of view rather than a new build). When looking at gaming benchmarks I keep finding an E8400 at 3GHz (nevermind 4GHz!) way up there on the charts. I'm not quite sure what to make of dual-core 4 thread CPUs just yet. The chips themselves are good prices but the current price of memory kills the deal.

The only game that had interested me that plays badly on a dual core is GTA 4 (which I have now finished) If there were more games where there was a big difference, I would be happier about parting with cash.

So my boring conclusion is:

Plan A: Wait untill memory prices come down and/or there is 4ghz quad-core (or 6 core:p) CPU to buy and have a big upgrade.
Plan B: I know it won't happen but keep an eye on the Q9550 price to see if there's a big price cut and then maybe buy that.
 
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Wouldn't the money be better spent on a GPU ?

I'm in nearly the same boat but hanging on till those 5850's come down a bit!
 
Q9550 if you can find one cheap, tho IMO £170 not that bad a price for one - they still put out plenty of bang per buck... no point "upgrading" to an AMD system IMO as its all the hassle of moving from a system you know works, to something thats an unknown quantity (tho will probably work fine) and involve an OS reinstall, etc. and AMD have nothing out at the moment that really an improvement on a Q9550 clock for clock - it would be a sidegrade at best.

i5 and i7 platforms while they are much quicker for specific tasks... but they are <30% faster on average compared to LGA775. Off the top of my head the i5 750 is 9% faster on average across a big range of tasks to a Q9550 clock for clock. So unless you are doing something that you know can take full advantage of the power an i7 setup can provide its not worth the money.

And personally I don't think buying based on upgrade potential makes much sense any more... lately AMD while being socket compatible are often going beyond the sensible power draw of older generation boards or not fully supporting minor feature changes in the hardware... so you might as well upgrade to a new AMD board when you get a new CPU anyhow... and theres always questions over the i5 and i7 future socket wise. The only advantage would possibly be getting a bit more for your old kit when you do upgrade + making a bit off your current kit when you upgrade now... but personally I don't see that really making much difference to just spending less money now on just a CPU upgrade and saving the rest for the next upgrade down the line.

My Q9550 is a fairly recent one and overclocks very well - 3.825gig on a board thats far from ideal - and would do 4gig with ease on a better motherboard... its 4gig stable on this one but needs more voltage than I'm happy with due to the boards poor vdroop.
 
A q9550 topping out at 3.5ghz suggests user error to me. If you like overclocking, there's nothing quite like the challange of a intel quad on P45. After months spent on the thing I firmly believe it marked the limits of fsb.

Regarding processing speed, I went from q9550 to i7 920 when my motherboard died and decided to take the processor out with it. Hyperthreading is excellent for folding@home, otherwise the only difference I've felt is that the 920 is a hell of a lot easier to take to 4ghz. Being able to disable cores at will is pretty cool too.

One thing is that the q9550 has a 8.5 multiplier. That drove me mad, couldn't get nice round numbers out of it. Don't think it would annoy most people though, nonetheless I'd be looking for a second hand q9650 personally.
 
Ignoring the cost side of matters an upgrade to a Q9650 running @ 4ghz+ would be a good move.( Although IMHO the performance increase in general use and games (excepting those specifically written with quads in mind - not a huge no. yet!) is not going to blow you away)

UNFORTUNATELY the cost cannot be ignored and so ,logically, got to say that unless you can do the swap for no more than ,say, £50 (pushing it £80) your better bet is to wait and go for a full 'upgrade' e.g i7 / maybe i5 a little earlier than if you were to move to the quad.

BUT why should you listen to me listen to me ,the man who changed cpu from a E8400 to a Q9550 within 3mths and then 7/8months later to a Q9650 :( a fool and his money ...... BUT I've finally got a very cool quad running at 4ghz :D
Got to lastly mention that I've read that the Biostar motherboard you list as using is very good at clocking dual cores but might not be so capable at clocking quads :( I hope I'm not casting doubt upon what may be the best board there is but when I moved from the P35 board I had - it failed - I chose an Asus P5Q-E and against the Biostar board because of concerns in this area. Am ,however, easily :confused::confused: though :D
 
My system is similar to yours and I've been trying to decide when I should next upgrade. E8600 @ 4.44 at the moment though it can go higher. The computer is primarily for gaming which should be considered.

I am tempted by the Q9650
 
Unless you specifically need a quad core processor for video editing for example, I would stick with the system you have till you have enough for an upgrade to an i7 system. A lot of talk about quads is that they will become utilized eventually by software publishers. The fact is that by the time that happens i7 systems will probably be a lot cheaper than they are now. I believe at the moment you could count on one hand the games that support quad cores, and a great deal more dont even support dual core.
 
neithcat said:
My system is similar to yours and I've been trying to decide when I should next upgrade. E8600 @ 4.44 at the moment though it can go higher. The computer is primarily for gaming which should be considered.

I am tempted by the Q9650
Click to expand...

Thats a lot of money for an old chip.
 
Thing is, if I'm not gaming, I do video and audio editing/encoding, and a quad will speed that up considerably no?

I'm trying to get as much power for as little cost as I am buying a place later this year and money will be tighter than it has been the past few years.
 
chippy08 said:
Thats a lot of money for an old chip.
Click to expand...

The 'old' chips can hold their own against i-whatevers pricewise purely because i-whatevers are hardly revolutionary in performance. Sure, they're a step forward. But value for money compared to the previous generation, which still run very well indeed? Probably not, especially given the pretty messy upgrade path with all the options available now.

When old chips start coming down in price we'll know the 'mass' market has been convinced that buying new CPU/motherboard/RAM is cost effective. Until then, prices will stay stubbornly high.

Which is a real shame, because I want to replace my 3GHz E6600 with an E8400. My machine runs everything I throw at it with ease, and a nice step up from 3GHz to 3.6 or 4 should see this machine run happily for another couple of years.

Famous last words. :-)

Andrew McP
 
Not sure how well they hold up against the newer Quads but Q6600s can be had on various auction sites relatively cheaply. I picked mine up for around £105 in September 2008. Still about the same price now, but to me seems a fair as mine flies through everything I need it for.
 
Tbh, just stick with what you have, it's more than enough to handle nearly every task, especially with a 4Ghz overclock. Upgrade your graphics down the line if you feel the need/can justify the cost. You might wanna grab a quad if you can score it cheaply off somewhere like eBay or MM.

I personally change platforms once every 5 years! :)
 
I'm still using an E6600 @ 3gig in my main desktop - its still that fast... and my laptop has the equivalent of an E8300 - 2.83gig 6Mb cache - and I can't fault it on performance either... however for map compiling and video gaming I have a Q9550 with a good overclock on it and it deff. shows its merit there - even when its not a huge performance boost directly everything stays silky smooth in situations where the dual core stutters.
 
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