Is it worth geting a Q6600?

[liveforeva]

Hi i am thinking of upgrading my E6600 to a Q6600 and was wondering if it is worth it.

My E6600 is overclocked to 3.6 and all i really use my pc for is gaming.
My motherboard is an asus commando with 4gig of ram and a ati 4870 1gig graphics card.

At the moment everything i throw at it runs fine, but for how long?
So should i upgrade?

 

[cje]

If your only gaming, then no. If your into video encoding and other stuff where a quad core excels, then maybe.

But a 3.6ghz duo can hold it's own in games. If I'm correct, not many games take advantage of quad cores. GTA IV does, can't think of any else off the top of my head right now....

 

[D D Danneh]

If it's mainly for gaming, you really won't see much of a difference, if any. Most games don't benefit from a quad core. I would wait until you start to notice slowdown (which I expect wouldn't be for quite a while, that C2D will do you very well), then upgrade.

 

[philip j fry]

You could upgrade and its probably going to give you a bit better performance and would be more future proof "when" more games start making use of it , but tbh if you are happy that it runs all your games fine then wait till it starts dropping in performance enough for you to think time to upgrade then see what is around to replace it .cpu's seem to be upgraded quite often and as a result quad core cpu's are probably a bit of an overkill when it comes to gaming tbh.

 

[Phatjayunoi]

The E6600 especially at 3.6Ghz is plenty enough for gaming currently. General concensus is that any decent Core 2 Duo overclocked at around 3.2Ghz (65nm and 45nm alike) and above, and with a good graphics card is enough for games currently.

Seeing as all you are really doing is playing games, the E6600 is fine as it is. As mentioned before, a Quad Core CPU benefits mostly from the likes of Video Encoding or extremely heavy multitasking applications (If the program is sufficiently optimised for that!).

Not many games these days still take Quad Cores into account. GTAIV would be an exception but even then that game is an example of an unoptimised and badly done Console port, even with recent patches that tries to improve performance.

So yeah to sum it up, just save your money unless you really feel like spending it. The E6600 is still a good CPU. I estimate it should still last you a year or so at least, and by then, the i7/i5 or whatever will still take a while to become more mainstream. More games would probably be programmed for those in mind.

 

[setter]

Personaly i wouldnt bother for the time being, you already have a good system, wait till phenom2 and intel's 17 mature, then move onto a whole new system