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CPU advice please

Mejaybee

Mejaybee

Mejaybee

Associate
Joined
11 Jan 2009
Posts
12
Hello, i'm looking for a bit of advice.....

I currently have an Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 "LGA775 Conroe" 2.40GHz (1066FSB) and was considering upgrading to an Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550 LGA775 'Yorkfield' 2.83GHz 12MB-cache (1333FSB), would this be worth doing and can anyone tell me if the quad core would be compatible with an Asus P5N-E SLi nForce 650 (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard, taking into account that i dont overclock anything and if the quad core wouldn't be compatible would it be worth upgrading to a 3.0 ghz duo ????

Any help/advice much appreciated o//
 
The PC is mainly used for gaming and burning the the odd DVD, the main reason i feel the need to upgrade is the fact that while burning discs it often tops out the core it's using and doesn't seem to use the other core, this is the first dual core PC i've built/owned so my knowledge of how they work is fairly limited :confused:

I have a very little knowledge of overclocking, any previous attempts i've made have not gone well, so i tend to steer it a wide bearth now :o
 
Unless you're doing any encoding you wouldnt see much benefit, you'd see more benefit getting a better dual core, the E8500 is bang on for price/performance ratio right now, it has higher cache and faster speed, 6mb vs 4mb and 3.16Ghz vs 2.4Ghz, and if you did decide to give OC'ing a go you'll get it upto 4 Ghz no problems. Whats the rest of your system though? you might benefit more from a simple RAM upgrade, depending on what you're running now
 
are you covnerting from 1 video format to another?

if so try a different program and see if it loads both cores, if the program can only use 1 core, the quad isnt going to help too much. i would focus on trying out better software first
 
Full system specs are as follows....

Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 "LGA775 Conroe" 2.40GHz (1066FSB)
GeIL 3GB (3x1GB) PC2-6400C4 800MHz
Asus P5N-E SLi nForce 650 (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2
Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro CPU Cooler
BFG GeForce 8800 GTX OC 768MB GDDR3 HDTV/Dual DVI
Tagan TG580-U15 580W ATX2.01 Easycon SLi Compliant Modular Silent PSU
Antec P180 Advanced Super Midi Tower Case

When i put it all together it was all fairly new stuff but as i'm sure you know it doesn't take long for it to become dated and i dont really want to go for a full upgrade just yet, i had hoped a faster CPU would do the job for now.

ConvertX has proved to be the best software i've found for burning movies to DVD, i also have Nero but it has it's problems :(

A faster Duo wouldn't break the bank :)
 
Get a quad if anything, lots of games now starting to use all the cores, for instance the latest Call of Duty game. However I am not sure you will see much of a performance improvment with a change in CPU. I have always found CPU upgrades to be disapointing same with overclocking the CPU. I think to realy feel a difference you will need to get a CPU that is a lot quicker than your current setup.
 
A Q9550 will not work in an Asus P5N-E. Only Nvidia's 780i and above support Yorkfield quad cores.

If you're desperate for a quad, get a Q6600, but they're not great at stock speed and the 650i chipset is poor at overclocking them.
 
I'm not desperate to go for a quad core, having read a bit more on this forum i'm considering going for the E8500 3.16 Duo, it may not make a huge difference but it seems like the best upgrade option available to me atm.

Thanks for all your help :)
 
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