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Core 2 Quads - Who still using them?

Still using my Q9550 been O/C-ed to 3.41GHz since June 2009, not a great O/C but the board I have is a bitch to O/C (Biostar Tpower i45) not much point in upgrading atm (added 2 x 6950 2Gb in CrossFire Sept 2011) only really been using for browsing and downloading.

Not been gaming on this for a long time, Xbox sees all the action, if and when I get any free time.
 
I had until the middle of this year (2012) a less than usual Quad Core Core 2 Duo. It was a Xeon X3210 2.13 Ghz S775 affair. Was solid and ran well. I sold it and the MB and put the proceeds towards my current Core i5.

Upgraded due to the limitations of the MB. It was maxed out with 6Gb RAM for a start.
 
Still got my Q6600 System in sig, my dell 2407 rev2 still going strong!
Only play bad company 2 and guild wars 2 which ot runs flawlessly!
 
Using the rig I have in my sig...Given the money I could get from a sale...what realistically should I be looking at, money wise, to upgrade to a sandy chip with mobo and ram?

CPU
MOBO
RAM
COOLER

all to be sold to fund a sandy rig...Would it be : money from current rig + say....£200 = for a new sandyB setup?

Is it even worth it going for Sandybridge now? I used to game a lot but not so much these days (I'm now 36 with family)
 
subbytna said:
Using the rig I have in my sig...Given the money I could get from a sale...what realistically should I be looking at, money wise, to upgrade to a sandy chip with mobo and ram?
Click to expand...

Depends how cheap you wanna do it.

The i5 2500K is currently on weekly offer for £155,
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=CP-360-IN&groupid=701&catid=6&subcat=1275

You can pick up a decent b grade Z68 board from the clearance section for £35 and up,
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=BG-252-GI

And for memory it doesn't sound like you need more than 8GB so this should do nicely at £27,
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MY-290-CS&groupid=701&catid=8&subcat=1517


Thats £217 for what will be a very noticable performance increase over an OC'd Q9550 (and thats before you overclock the i5). The rest of your system should be good for a while. (as the Q9550 is one of the best CPU's they made for that socket they still demand quite a premium so you should make back a nice portion of what you spend).
 
Dayzed&Confused said:
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...
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Well, in any job you'll ind some good IT and some bad IT Techies. I'm sure that are both on this forum with some of the posts of "advice" I read (I am aware there are hobbiests on here too).

However there is a money factor and you may find your IT Techie just doesn't get the budget he wants to upgrade all those systems. The CPUs running at stock should be OK for most stuff, but 512MB RAM is terrible.

At my place of work though we have Celerons (P3 or P4 era) with 256MB RAM and they wonder why the latest XP update keeps failing...

Zillio said:
Q6600 OC to 3.2 ghz, thinking of going to i7 and get an ssd
Click to expand...
Try just getting an SSD first. That alone will make tons of difference. I have a P4 with a second generation SSD and it flies, not at gaming but it does everything else pretty well.
 
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linktoinsanity said:
Try just getting an SSD first. That alone will make tons of difference. I have a P4 with a second generation SSD and it flies, not at gaming but it does everything else pretty well.
Click to expand...

I'd second that. My system is based around a Q6600 o/c'd to @3.2Ghz and when I dropped an OCZ Vertex in there as my O/S drive the difference was simply amazing in almost all areas. :)
 
I built my current rig about 3 1/2 years ago mainly due to the fact that my local purple shirt store had mistakenly priced their Q9400s for £99. I paired that with 8GB DDR2 and a P5Q Deluxe MB, and this little machine has coped amazingly with everything i have thrown at it over the past few years. The Q9400 I got is a sweet little chip as I have it clocked to 3.2GHz at 1.152V, and I've never tried taking it any higher as it is fast enough for what I need. Last Christmas I was able to add a little Crucial M4 128GB, so that removed the mechanical drive bottleneck.

I've been looking at the new Intel line lately as the upgrade itch occasionally surfaces, but every time I price it up I just can't get past the fact that my current rig was such good performance for money.
 
currently running a q9650 @ 3.6ghz with 8gb ddr3 ram, im shocked how well this cpu hands stuff even today, i can see me keeping this cpu for a lot longer, and in the future it will find its place in my home server running under clocked and under volted. its a fantastic cpu.
 
using a Q6600 @ 3.35Ghz, ive just notched it back form 3.5 and the only thing really making me contemplate upgrading is power consumption and some new shiny box's, thats it.
 
andy_mk3 said:
The Q6600 was certainly the 2500k of it's day :)
Click to expand...

certainly was. i do agree that for me overall daily performance cant be beaten by the addition of a SSD, its unreal just how much of real world impact it makes...... A fast cpu goes a very long way too though!
 
I've never tried it on DDR3...just DDR2.

A SSD with any of the older C2Q cpus REALLY makes a difference. Slotting in a ssd would give you at least another 6 months before you look to upgrade. Adding a decent graphics card and SSD will give you another year at least.
 
Well i did it,purchased a z86ud5 and 2500k, for kicks i had a tamper with my q6600 and had it booting at 3.8, i could enter windows and start cpuz but then it would bsod, still blame the xms2 800, if it could do 950 i reckon id have been on to a real winner :D

the more volts i gave the ram the further i got but i didnt feel comfortable going into the territory i was heading :(
 
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