How much difference would there be in a new spec?

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3 Jan 2011
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My present setup (not sure of the motherboard or cpu cooler details):

Gigabyte motherboard
Intel Quad Core 6600 @ 2.4GHz
OCZ 2 x 1GB DDR2 800
Nvidia 880GT graphics card PCI-e
Tagan 480W PSU
OCZ 60GB Vertex 2 SSD
WD Raptor 74GB
Samsung F3 1TB
Some other 400-500GB hard drive.
Pioneer DVD Writer

Works well for me although some games such as COD2 can have major slowdown but that's probably due to the gc more than anything.

As far as I know, I don't do anything too cpu intensive. Few games, internet, downloading, extracting, watching videos and the usual stuff.

The SSD had sped up a few things and lack of noise from it is nice (although can't tell if it's doing anything because of that).

If I were to upgrade everything to say a Sandybridge 2500k or 2600k with a GF460 or 470 at least, would anything bar a few games at high resolutions be noticable?
 
What games are we talking about here?

But no, you won't see any real difference in anything but top end games.

Generally a Q6600 is sufficient to play around 80% of games currently out on high settings, so if you are seeing poor frame rates you could just spend £200 on a mid-top end graphics card and problem solved.
 
More importantly, why is your Q6600 at stock? Get a half decent cooler and get it clocked for some free performance gain. That coupled with a new graphics card and maybe another 2Gb of ram will give you a big performance boost.
 
More importantly, why is your Q6600 at stock? Get a half decent cooler and get it clocked for some free performance gain. That coupled with a new graphics card and maybe another 2Gb of ram will give you a big performance boost.

+1

Didn't even notice that - whenever I see Q6600 I automatically assume its overclocked :p
 
Did try using guides here when I first got it but couldn't fully get the hang of overclocking and really didn't want to inadvertantly fry something.

Games wise, like the COD games, Crysis and was playing Fallout: NV until recently.
Pretty much FPS games although enjoy older games more when they actually run under Win 7 64 Bit.
 
Q6600's are virtually bomb proof. I had one running at 3.8Ghz. Easy overclock to do is 9x333mhz for 3Ghz. Should be able to do that at stock volts or with a slight increase. Don't forget to adjust your ram speed as well. As you increase the fsb you also increase the speed of the ram. You want it running at or below it's rated speed until you find a max overclock.
 
Only thing's I would do to your PC would be upgrade the RAM to 4GB and newer graphics card... maybe the 5870 as that is pretty cheap considering the card you get?

Definitely look in to OCing too, that'd easily see the life of your current set up extended!
 
Definitely stick in another 2GB of RAM as that will give a big performance boost.
Q6600 is perfectly fine.
After putting in more RAM, if you still feel it's lacking in performance, upgrade the graphics card and away you go!
 
Would another 2gb of ram really give that bigger performance boost... I can see it will give some but not a huge amount I'd have thought.
Definitely get a better gpu though.
 
If you're using Vista/W7, then in games definitely. I went from 2GB to 4GB (well actually 3.3GB; was still using 32-bit at that point) and noticed a big difference.
 
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