Is it worth upgrading from an FX60 to a Penryn?

mea98rm · 22 Dec 2007 at 18:32

Hi - I feel like treating myself the Christmas and have just been browsing the OCUK site to see what is available. I currently have:

A mildly overclocked AMD Athlon FX60 (2.7 ghz)
DFI NF4 Expert
2GB DDR RAM
BFG 8800 GTX.
Dell 2407 monitor

I only use the computer for browsing and gaming. I game at 1920 x 1200, and mainly play WoW, Battlefield 2 and CoD4. I recently bought Crysis too, but that runs like a complete dog.

I have had this setup for over a year, but I can't see anything that is really going to improve my gameplay experience much. The GTX is still nearly top of the range. A new Penryn QX9650, Maximus Extreme motherboard and some DDR3 RAM looks very tempting, but I am guessing that I will still be badly GPU limited by the GTX and won't see any framerate improvement. Is this assumption correct?

As a side note, I've been a PC enthusiast for years, but at the moment the lack of high end competition for Intel and Nvidia is really disappointing. Now it looks like Nvidia will be delaying the release of their next high end GPU as there is nothing from ATI which can compete with their current high end GPU.

Defcon5 · 22 Dec 2007 at 21:29

Nice spec, what ram is it? id have thought the FX will do 3ghz as a matter of course

Darkwave · 22 Dec 2007 at 21:42

You will still be GPU limited in newer titles, especially Crysis, but if you use your PC for anything other than gaming or just want something new to play with and/or overclock then a Penryn will be a pretty huge step up and an awesome Christmas present to yourself.

mea98rm · 22 Dec 2007 at 23:01

The RAM is OCZ PC4000 Gold rated at 3-4-3-8 timings. It uses Samsung UCCC chips. Unfortunately my FX60 is a bit of duffer in terms of overclocking (It is an LCBIE stepping) Although it will boot into Windows all the way upto 3.2ghz, it isn't ORTHOS stable at anything over 2.8ghz. Even to get that, I need to use crazily high voltage - 1.6V. I bought it with high hopes of getting it to 3 ghz, but it wasn't to be. Probably the worst overclocking chip I've ever owned

Penryn would be a good toy to play with. I hear that 4 ghz on air is pretty normal. It's very tempting!