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Core 2 Quads - Who still using them?

I think see your point now is the c2q should be enough for most things yet, hence the i7 isn't maxed out. Point taken.

I had a q9450 for a while on a DDR2 rig and felt the E8500 on a DDR3 machine I have felt much faster for most things. Though I'm doing a good bit of encoding so I should probably have kept the q9450. My laptops have much slower C2d's so they feel slow, but the q9450 and E8500 feel plenty fast yet.
 
I think another point worth mentioning is the limitation/bottleneck of Northbridge (NB). As we all know it acts as an interface between cpu and ram and runs at its own clock speed. Even the gpu has to communicate through northbridge.

Afaik the highest clock speed/frequency of northbridge that you can select for lga 775 is 400Mhz especially if you are overclocking your cpu by increasing FSB.

For example my Q9650@4Ghz has FSB 445Mhz and FSB: Dram ratio is 1:1, so my ram is also running at 445Mhz (DDR2 890Mhz). So cpu and ram are exactly synced in terms of data transfer speed between the two components. However the data still has to travel through northbridge running at 400Mhz and this would create bottleneck in the system as either cpu and ram would have to wait for data thus losing clock cycles to idleness.

So even if someone manages to overclock their core 2 cpu to 4.5Ghz (500Mhz FSB x 9 mulit), they would still be bottlenecked by 400Mhz NB affecting performance, though I am not sure how much of this would impact gpu performance. But I suspect it would still affect it aswell.

This is why i series cpus give much better performance as they have memory controller built in facilitating direct communication between cpu and ram aswell as gpu communicating directly with cpu, along with other architectural improvements.

Core 2 cpus are still good but are to some extent held back by lga 775 architecutre

Although this is related to phenom 2 but his finding is similar to what I have discussed:
http://www.overclock.net/t/1185220/northbridge-overclocking
 
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one day you will need to make the jump to the new generation and either way its going to cost you, that's what i am doing now, selling my q8200 and DDR2 memory to fund my upgrade (well that's what the wife thinks, what stays in paypal is all mine)
 
Still using a Q8200 for now have it clocked at 2.8Ghz which wasnt easy (had to overvolt the bridge between the 2 pairs of dual cores. The rest of the system is 6Gb DDR2 800Mhz ram on an Asus P5Q SE PLUS, 700w Coolermaster PSU, HD7970 and a 750Gb HDD.

I did have it running with a ATI X1900XT until it died but then I decided with a new rig in mind to go all out and buy a Sapphire 7970 Ghz edition, which is obviously held back a lot on my current system.

I have my new rig on order from the lovely people at overclockers

£383.29 x 1 - Intel Core i7-3930K 3.20GHz (Sandybridge-E) Socket LGA2011 Processor - Retail
£258.32 x 1 - Asus Rampage IV Extreme Intel X79 (Socket 2011) DDR3 Motherboard
£249.99 x 1 - OcUK Tech Lab - V8 Watercooled Case - Antec P280 Super Midi Tower Case - Gun Metal Black
£208.29 x 1 - GeIL EVO Veloce Frost White 32GB (4x8GB) DDR3 PC3-19200C11 2400MHz Quad Channel Kit (GEW332GB2400C11AQC)
£149.99 x 1 - OCZ Vertex 4 256GB 2.5" SATA 6Gbs Solid State Hard Drive (VTX4-25SAT3-256G)
£29.98 x 1 - Asus PCE-N53 300Mbps Dual-Band Wireless-N600 PCI-E Adapter
-£2.49 x 1 - OcUK Mega Mat XL Gaming Surface & Elite Mug Bundle
£3.32 x 1 - Official Overclockers UK Elite Gaming Mug
£9.15 x 1 - OcUK Mega Mat XL Elite Tactical Gaming Surface ** IN STOCK **
£8.32 x 4 - Antec TwoCool™120 2 speed 120mm Case Fan
£7.49 x 1 - Arctic Silver 5 Thermal Compound (3.5g)

I cannot wait to get it up and running.....

As I was reading through I have seen people saying they dont know whether to upgrade or wait for Haswell, well I am gonna try to do some benchmarks for you guys before it all arrives and seeing as i am already using my severely bottlenbecked 7970, it will be cool to see the difference between the 2 processors, also at stock and overclocked as i will be hoping for 4.5Ghz minimum on my 3930k.

Anyways was cool reading through all your posts and yep the c2q's were a great line of processors.
 
I'm still using mine, spec in sig below. Quite content with it, so far it's never struggled to throw run anything I throw at it including the latest games and applications.

When it does start to show signs of struggling, I'll start thinking about upgrading. ;)
 
I've just made the jump from Q9550 to i2500k, cost me next to nothing as the Q9xxx chips still fetch a good price.

The reason I changed is that BF3 was maxing my 3.6Ghz Q9550 and dropping my minimum FPS regularly - only in 64 player multiplayer but was enough to be annoying.

Very positive experience I have to say, bodged my watercooling onto the new socket (drilled new holes in the water block - dodgy but worked!) and already running at 4.6ghz. Overclocking these new chips is just too easy, not like the old days!
 
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Alkalinepro5 said:
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 :(
Click to expand...

What platform do you think first got DDR3 RAM? Socket 775.
 
pecnarf said:
well i still using my q9550 @ 3.4ghz with 8gb ram on my striker II extreme but saving up to upgrade.

if you heavy guild wars 2, starcraft 2 or other cpu depend games you will see a big different between 775 quad and 1155 quad, as their been benchmark test to prove that the i7 run much much better than the c2q cpu in those games.
Click to expand...

is starcraft 2 that demanding then? because i have that and run it perfectly, i didnt know the requirements i just had it and had no problems with it, dont play it now though, gone back to console gaming over pc gaming.
 
I've just build my home server with bits bought on the interweb. For £29 I got a Xeon Quad Core Processor X3210 8M Cache 2.13 GHz 1066 MHz SLACU and for £19 an Intel DQ35JOE matx board, so there won't be any ocing which is fine for the intended purpose.
 
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in the process of building a few seti crunchers using a q6600 and q9550 good solid little chips and can pick them up for pennies these days compared to your 3930k's :)
 
My school insists that underclocked Core 2 Duo E4300s with 512mb ram is enough to cope with all IT applications, our school deals with a lot of CAD and CFD work, somehow I think our IT man will soon be on job seekers...
 
farlow2012 said:
i was thinking the same ...looking around on google lol there a few q9550 hitting 4ghz so i think 3.8 definatly possible with a little time patience
Click to expand...

With these CPUs the weak point is often the motherboard rather than the CPU - I got my Q9550 to 4GHz on this nForce 750 chipset having to push quite a lot of volts through it and modding the board and even 3.825GHz is quite a struggle - but I originally had the CPU in a P45 board which did 3.825 no sweat barely having to touch any settings and ~4.6GHz (never tested 100% stability) with the kind of voltages it takes to get 4GHz stable on the nForce.
 
Rroff said:
With these CPUs the weak point is often the motherboard rather than the CPU - I got my Q9550 to 4GHz on this nForce 750 chipset having to push quite a lot of volts through it and modding the board and even 3.825GHz is quite a struggle - but I originally had the CPU in a P45 board which did 3.825 no sweat barely having to touch any settings and ~4.6GHz (never tested 100% stability) with the kind of voltages it takes to get 4GHz stable on the nForce.
Click to expand...

Yeah agree

Nvidia chipsets are infamous for poor overclocking capability. The P45 imo is the best 775 chipset. Just slight increase in cpu voltage and my Q9650 is cheering at 4Ghz with ease :cool:
 
P45 was better than X48 despite being cheaper for clocking the 45nm quad cores. Couldn't push beyond 3.6ghz with my q9550 on X48 because of the FSB wall.
 
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