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Old vs new, real world performance.

I'm currently in the same situation, my current spec is

Abit ul8
athlon 64 x2 4600 skt 939
2gb ddr 400 ram
radeon 3650 agp
hiper type r 580w
320gb sata drive
windows xp home

moving to this slowly ready for windows 7

gigabyte am2+ mobo matx
phenom 2 955
8gb corsair xms2 1066
either radeon 4890 or 5850
corsair 620tx psu
antec p180 mini
1tb hitatchi sata2 hdd
windows 7 home

I'm just hoping that the new system will see a definate speed increase across the board, what do you guys think ?
 
Ive noticed no difference whatsoever in games with a few cpu changes lately, first was a q6600 at 3.8ghz, next was a q9550 at 3.8ghz im now on an i7 920 currently running stock, even still no big difference, graphics card is the main thing theese days.
 
Randell said:
I bet a lot of the extra smoothness also comes from the increase in cache. The E4300 only has 2MB. I wonder if people with dual cores or quads with 6MB or 8MB L2 cache would see even less difference in games moving to i7.
Click to expand...

Id like to know this cos Ive got a E8400 with 6mb cache, at 3.6ghz.
 
I recently went from a trusty Conroe 1.86ghz E6300 (same chip as the OP I believe) clocked to 2.8ghz to a Q6700 because it was the fastest chip my motherboard (GA 965P-DS3 rev1 with 4gb of pc6400 ram) would take. After toying with an i5/i7 upgrade, I decided that in the short/medium term the Q6700 on my existing mobo was just as good a solution for games, and in a year or 18 months 1156 will be a much more mature platform.

This decision has been totally vindicated by the performance of the Q6700. It's currently running at 3.2ghz, which I can probably improve on, but nevertheless the difference is a lot more than the 400mhz gap would suggest. In games that are actually a cpu-hog such as WoW since Wotlk the performance is improved beyond my expectations. Maybe it's the doubled cache, I don't know. Empire Total War, now with quad core support, has gone from being practically unplayable to being perfect even with unit sizes on huge.

Whatever you decide, whether it's just a stopgap like me or a full blown i5/i7 upgrade, you will definitely perceive a difference in games going from the old Conroe E6300. As for clocking the E6300 to 3ghz and beyond, it is doable, but the best I could ever manage was 2.94ghz stable, and the heat difference between 2.8ghz and 2.94ghz was enough to make it not worth it.
 
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matt d938 said:
I'm currently in the same situation, my current spec is

Abit ul8
athlon 64 x2 4600 skt 939
2gb ddr 400 ram
radeon 3650 agp
hiper type r 580w
320gb sata drive
windows xp home

moving to this slowly ready for windows 7

gigabyte am2+ mobo matx
phenom 2 955
8gb corsair xms2 1066
either radeon 4890 or 5850
corsair 620tx psu
antec p180 mini
1tb hitatchi sata2 hdd
windows 7 home

I'm just hoping that the new system will see a definate speed increase across the board, what do you guys think ?
Click to expand...

err yeah. Your old system isn't in the same league as an old intel conroe system. When we talk about not noticing much increase in gaming with dual-core to quad etc, we don't mean old athlons :) I mean you might have got some mileage from more ram and a new GPU but I did see a big difference coming to this E8400 from an Opteron.
 
i am also in a similir situation, i play a lot of flight sim, whihc is supposed to be very cpu intensive, which is making think go i5 or 955, then a 5870 after christmas, as opposed to the other way round. but i dont know if that is the right way round or not. Oh decsisions, so hard.
 
id like to know if the sheer clockspeed of the cpu ever is more important than the architecture - ie would a q9650 at 3.0 ghz say overclocked to 4.0 ghz beat an an i7 920 at stock.

edit ok a q9650 at 4ghz is probably likely to outperform a i7 920 stock at that clock but say how fast does a core 2 quads clockspeed have to go to outperform a i7 in general?
 
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I know it's a year out of date, but this is a very good article examining CPU scaling in games:

http://www.guru3d.com/article/cpu-scaling-in-games-with-quad-core-processors/3

Long story short: If you're gaming above 1280 x 1024 (i.e. 99% of people), you are GPU-limited.

I always advocate spending twice as much on the graphics card as the CPU and I think we can all see that a Core 2 with ATI 5870 is going to perform much better in games than an i7 with ATI 3xxx for example.
 
Jimbo Mahoney said:
I know it's a year out of date, but this is a very good article examining CPU scaling in games:

http://www.guru3d.com/article/cpu-scaling-in-games-with-quad-core-processors/3

Long story short: If you're gaming above 1280 x 1024 (i.e. 99% of people), you are GPU-limited.

I always advocate spending twice as much on the graphics card as the CPU and I think we can all see that a Core 2 with ATI 5870 is going to perform much better in games than an i7 with ATI 3xxx for example.
Click to expand...

Thank you very much, that is a fantastic article, if people are considering upgrading their CPU I'd really recommend you have a mooch over those figures, defo not upgrading my CPU after reading that.

Gpu and Ram for me.
 
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