E5200 to QX6700

[Vale]

My brother has an E5200 clocked to 3 gig and a GTX 460 768 meg, 8 gig ram. He has been offered a QX6700 for £90, is it worth the upgrade? he likes playing Battlefield 3 and plays at 1680x1050 on a Syncmaster 2232BW Samsung.

Worth it or not? Would he see any benefit on BF3? it looks ok at the moment to me but for £90 I am unsure...

 

[cmndr_andi]

To be honest, I wouldn't go for it.

For one thing the QX6700 is only available in the older B3 stepping - so don't expect it to overclock as well as G0 stepping Q6600 and Q6700 CPUs.

Also, £90 is a lot of money for a 65nm quad core (especially one that doesn't overclock as well as a G0) - G0 Q6600/6700 chips can be had for £60-70, going for one of these would be a much better bet.

As for performance increases, BF3 doesn't seem to be held back by dual core CPUs (see here). However, many other modern games (like Crysis 2) make good use of quad core CPUs and they do provide tangible performance benefits.

 

[Nevakonaza]

Id say its a good upgrade,I remember going from my Dual core E6300 @ 3.5Ghz to a Q6600 at the same clock 3.5Ghz and the diffrence was huge!

Although i would try and knock him down a bit,Maybe offer him £75....then again its not everyday you see a QX6700 for sale....the Q6 Series are still decent Cpus.

Does his GTX 460 768Mb cope very well with BF3 though?...considering it only has 768mb vram?

 

[spain]

At his res that should be plenty of vram. If he mainly plays bf3 and its fine how it is then just enjoy the game, save the money for a future upgrade.

 

[Deception]

If you can knock him down, then go for it. If not, I'd look around for a Q6600 and save some cash for a decent cooler and OC it BF3 does benefit from Quad core CPU's; I just upgraded my 2 nephews PC to a QQ660 and they love the improvement it made.

 

[Vale]

Thanks all, on a well know auction site I just bagged him a Q6600 Slacr for £75 with GO stepping. Any good??!!:???

 

[cmndr_andi]

Yup - sounds great.

Make sure he has a go at overclocking it

 

[Vale]

His board is a bit rubbish, it's an Asrock G41 VS3, there is no voltage control for the chip, this is all he has to change.

 

[cmndr_andi]

Ah, that is a shame - but bear in mind that most of these G0 Q6600 chips will hit 2.8-3GHz on stock voltage - so it is worth giving it a go, even if the board isn't great for overclocking.