Soldato
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Still using my Q6600 (slight OC to 3ghz), was thinking about either a cheap 2nd hand upgrade to a 2500k or waiting for Haswell. The set-up is holding back my 570.
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Core 2 Quads - Who still using them?
- Thread starter subbytna
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Associate
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I am on Q9650@4GHz
Went from E6600 to Q6600 to Q9650 and all have served me well.
Bought Q9650 for £132 from MM and its almost new taken from seller's HP business pc. Sold my Q6600 for £50 on ebay and so true cost is only £82 for my Q9650.
My Q9650 is low vid chip and with slight bump in cpu voltage, it is laughing at 4Ghz
Plays all games fine. Just need a more powerful gpu to replace my current 5850 for highest settings in games.
I was able to sell my Q6600 for £100 2 years ago :O
Hmmm, had an enforced holiday there but back now :/
Anyway I can still play decent frames in all games I play, Skyrim, BOPS, etc...I was going to go Ivy as an upgrade but can't justify it yet...maybe Haswell will change that though. I'll wait and see.
Anyway I can still play decent frames in all games I play, Skyrim, BOPS, etc...I was going to go Ivy as an upgrade but can't justify it yet...maybe Haswell will change that though. I'll wait and see.
Still using my Dual Quad-Core Xeons L5420's (2.5Ghz Stock - Masking Tape mod to 3Ghz) - essentially still Core2Quad chips.
Just dropped in a 7850 2GB (had a 4890 before) and still seems to be coping fine (only Games I am playing atm are WoW:MoP and FTL)
Next upgrade will be an SSD as still haven't got one, but will probably make the jump to the next cpu refresh whenever that is.
Just dropped in a 7850 2GB (had a 4890 before) and still seems to be coping fine (only Games I am playing atm are WoW:MoP and FTL)
Next upgrade will be an SSD as still haven't got one, but will probably make the jump to the next cpu refresh whenever that is.
I'm with you on that. Problem is, from what I'm reading, is that Haswell will only bring around 5-10% more to the CPU; the focus with Intel these days seems to be all about improving the iGPU.
As ever, I guess we'll just have to wait and see. I can only see myself being pushed over the edge to a new CPU when I see a new discrete graphics card from AMD/Nvidia that warrants an upgrade from my 570GTX. Not sure how the release dates of the next gen. GPUs match up with what Intel have planned for Haswell's release? Hopefully they'll all be available about the same time.
Still, it will also require software (games) that actually benefit from all this stuff. That's probably at least 12-18 months away.
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Soldato
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I would like to know if there are any games that make use of SSE3 instructions set and beyond. From reading some games system requirement description in steam, it seems SSE2 is already used in games.
Don't think I have heard of any game making use of AVX yet lol?
Yeah, I think what you'll find is that many of these heavy-usage scenarios for "vector" SIMD type instructions are actually played out on the GPU these days - Nvidia's physics being one example. AMD, of course, have similar provisions, via OpenCL rather than CUDA for their GPUs. I've only ever used CUDA from C, so not too familiar with the final detail of the AMD GPU stuff.
A lot of the SSE2/3 stuff I would have thought was still pretty easy to build into a game, being done via a compiler switch against the target C/C++ code, rather than developers programing "to the metal" and hard-coding these instructions in. I should imagine most games, even inadvertently, have some streaming instruction provision this way. I'm not a games programmer by trade (financial programming is my realm), so I'd have to bow to those with greater hands-on experience than mine.
Had a mate over today and I told him I'd popped in an i5 2500k and asked him to have a go with it (He also has an i5 2500k) He was raving about it saying that it was much better than my q9550 chip and how much faster the gaming was now I'd "got into the 21st century"
...the face on him when I told him it was still the 9550 lol
Just goes to show real life difference is minimal still...
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Had a mate over today and I told him I'd popped in an i5 2500k and asked him to have a go with it (He also has an i5 2500k) He was raving about it saying that it was much better than my q9550 chip and how much faster the gaming was now I'd "got into the 21st century"
...the face on him when I told him it was still the 9550 lol
It's a max of 10FPS~ in current games at 1920x1080 and beyond.
Unless you game at uber low res then its completely graphics card dependent. I was thinking of upgrading but every review suggests there really is no point for gaming.
The only problem is with core 2 quads is that you guys are limited to DDR2 ram
Im still using a Core 2 E8400 @ 4GHz. Still having no problems with gaming at 1920 x 1200 on a ATI 6950 2GB.
Im starting to get a bad itch to upgreade something. Last week i was looking into getting a new case that is larger than my crampped Antec 300. This week its to replace the cpu and motherboard. But i cant see that i will see much difference in gameing?
Im starting to get a bad itch to upgreade something. Last week i was looking into getting a new case that is larger than my crampped Antec 300. This week its to replace the cpu and motherboard. But i cant see that i will see much difference in gameing?
The only problem is with core 2 quads is that you guys are limited to DDR2 ram
just to give the facts ddr3 is not a cpu feature on the c2q cpu it a mortherboard feature so if your 775 socket mortherboard support ddr3 you will be running at ddr3, so when someone tell you that core 2 quad is limited to ddr2 this a half truth as it only limited to ddr2 if the mortherboard doesn't support ddr3 if the mortherboard support ddr3, then you can run you c2q with ddr3 memory. i know this as my mortherboard support ddr3 and i have 8gb of ddr3 ram init with my q9550 c2q cpu oc to 3.4ghz.
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Fair enough. I didn't even realise there were DDR3 775 motherboards around!
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There is really not much performance difference between DDR2 and DDR3.
But huge difference in what, though? On my machine, the most stressful thing I run is games, and to be honest they all run nice and smooth (570GTX, btw.)
Any benchmarks to show the before/after improvements you've seen?
NB. Honest question, btw, and not simply looking to doubt what you say. It's just that I can't imagine my games running any smoother than they do now, that's all. I have the cash put aside for an upgrade, but I've yet to be convinced that waiting for Haswell isn't the better choice - especially as it's a new socket and I don't want to change my mobo again... Maybe your experiences can convince me otherwise.
