i5 650 or stick with q9650

mdaw

mdaw

mdaw

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603
Hi all,

With my current system not working as i have a dead motherboard i have been offered by a friend a i5 650 with a DH57M01 motherboard (foxconn i think) that came out of a mainstream computer for very little money. Less than a new motherboard for my current q9650.

With both i would need to get new ram as i would upgrade to ddr3 as a lga 775 combo board supports both ddr2 and 3 and with a 64bit operating system and only having 4x1gb ddr2 i could not run that in a combo board as there is not enough ram slots to support 4gb unless i bought 2x2gb anyway which is more expensive than ddr3 equivalent. So its a no brainer to at least upgrade that.

Question is would you stick with the q9650 being quad core or go with the i5 650 which is only dual core as games are now using the full four cores?

Which is better?
 
True, it does sell well and so does the ram.

But my main question really is out of the two processors what would you take? Or which one is best?
 
Its a tough situation, but I would only suggest buying a new board for your Q9650 if you can find a really good deal for a nice quality LGA775 board (something like a P5Q board for £25 or less).

As this comparison shows, an i5 650 compares pretty favorably to a Q9650 in most tasks.

If you can't find a really cheap and decent LGA 775 board then I would seriously consider your friend's offer - how much is he offering it to you for?

Also, please bear in mind that the Q9650 is still worth a bit of money. One recently sold on the OCUK member market for £60 (and can go for even more). That kind of money would almost buy you a very decent AMD FX-4300 or FX-6300 and AM3+ motherboards can be pretty cheap. This may end up being a better option in the long run, since you are spending money on much newer gear.
 
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Yeah id looked at that but dont really understand everything being tested. From what i thought was going on i believe the i5 won all single threaded tasks and q9650 won multi threaded tasks or at least the majority.

He's offered it to me for £20. I can get a new lga 775 board for £51. (MSI G43m combo). From what i have read its micro atx and has no overclocking facility. So not sure of the quality. I know MSI produce some good stuff, especially recently. Everything else is second hand and most decent ones i have seen are going for upwards of £65.
 
Aye, in the single-thread tests and games the i5 wins and in most of the multithreaded tests the Q9650 wins (though not by as much as one would think considering it has twice as many physical cores).

For £20 you are getting a bit of a bargain there - it won't allow you to overclock (as its an pre-built PC board) however will get you up and running for little cost and in many tasks it will be faster. Plus it frees you up to sell the Q9650 and make some money while idiots will still buy it (I mean that chip is worth more now than the i7 920 is, which is insane).

I would certainly not buy a new LGA775 board, as you mention they are not well featured boards and only highly priced due to low availability. If you can't find a cheap, well featured LGA775 board second hand then that route is just not worth taking IMHO.

It is true that you will need to buy new DDR3 RAM, however once you buy a good DDR3 kit (1.5V, CL 9, 1600MHz) then you will be able to use the same modules for future DDR3 systems (still a little way off until DDR4).
 
Ok. Cheers for that. Two questions.

The motherboard is only capable of supporting 1333mhz ddr3. Can i put 1600mhz or 2400mhz ddr3 in and it will work but just at the 1333mhz speed?

Also i believe that motherboard has four dimm slots but i think each one will only allow four gb per slot allowing 16 gb. What would happen if i put 8gb sticks of ram in those slots? Would they just not work at all or would it just work at 4gb per stick of ram. Reason for asking is that i could buy a 2x8gb kit to use at a future date in a motherboard that supports 8gb per slot.
 
Ok. Cheers for that. Two questions.

The motherboard is only capable of supporting 1333mhz ddr3. Can i put 1600mhz or 2400mhz ddr3 in and it will work but just at the 1333mhz speed?

Also i believe that motherboard has four dimm slots but i think each one will only allow four gb per slot allowing 16 gb. What would happen if i put 8gb sticks of ram in those slots? Would they just not work at all or would it just work at 4gb per stick of ram. Reason for asking is that i could buy a 2x8gb kit to use at a future date in a motherboard that supports 8gb per slot.
 
I'm pretty sure that with an 8GB kit it just won't work, so you are best sticking with 4GB modules.

Yes, you can use faster-rated RAM as they should default to their SPD speed which should be 1333MHz.
 
Thank you for this. That really helps me know what to buy. I think i will look at putting a full 16gb in as a lot of systems seem to be going that way. Im sure 8 would be ok but im happy to spend the money and put extra in.

Which ram would you recommend? I want something with a good reputation for being solid and reliable as i've had problems in the past with rubbish ram. I could be wrong but i have always thought of kingston as being a very good brand.
 
Happy to help :)

Kingston are a good brand, as are Corsair, crucial and pretty much all of the brands available on OCUK (as they don't want to have the hassle of dealing with companies that make poor memory modules and have loads of returns).

I would probably opt for two of this kit, good brand and can run at 1600MHz CL9 @ 1.5 (which will be useful when you use it in a newer system).
 
wazza300 said:
does that board let you oc the i5? im not sure but if it does id go with the i5
Click to expand...

Unfortunately, it seems to be the board from the Dell XPS 8100 - so I'm pretty sure overclocking isn't on the cards.

But you are right, that i5 650 can certainly clock rather well. Perhaps if the OP can find a cheap second-hand LGA1156 board with good overclocking features then he could get a big boost out of the chip.
 
It seems to me that the 1156 boards are even harder to get hold of than the lga 775. I could buy them new. I havent seen any on the 1156. So doesnt look like any overclocking is going to be happening.

I cant use the members market yet as i think i need to have posted 100 times and im only half way there.
 
a stock i3 3220 is equal to an i3 540 @4.2ghz anyway so it might be worth going modern board/cpu?

or hold out for the Pentium anniversary chip which has an unlocked multi
 
Well i now have the processor and motherboard from my friend at work. I have realised that my graphics card is going to take up a lot of space on this board as it looks like a micro atx board. Will have to do some careful measuring to make sure the ram will fit once i get home and put it together.
 
Looking at images online of the DH57M01 board, you shouldn't have any trouble with installing the graphics cards and the RAM. Just make sure you have the RAM modules locked in fully before you install the graphics cards (which is the order to do it anyway).

Looking at the board you may have a little trouble with the SATA ports, but so long as you install the SATA cables before the graphics card then it should all sit together fine.
 
I've installed all but the ram now, wrong order maybe, but i dont have the ram yet and needed to look at what would fit. Turns out the heat sink over hangs the first dimm slot and might even slightly interfere withe the second with large ram modules. Therefore I ordered teamgroup vulcan orange 2400mhz from overclockers yesterday. I ordered 2 2x4gb kits as the price was so good at 55.99. They are standard size so should fit underneath the fan on my heatsink. I wanted to buy the kingston hyperx beast but they are another 1.4ch taller looking at the specs on the kingston website compared with standard sized ram at about 3cm-3.1cm tall.

Hopefully once that is in all will work fine. I've put bits and pieces together before like cpu and heat sink but never actually changed a motherboard so im slightly worried as i had no motherboard instructions that i have all wires/leads in the right place. Mainly those that come from the front panel like the power sw, reset sw. Etc. I have found one 2 pin connection that shows power sw but none for the reset sw and hdd cable there is the fp1 socket that i've put them in but nothing on the board to tell me if its the correct place to put those wires.
 
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