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If it could integrate properly, that would be great... But this latest gen of GPUs power down well on their own, it's not really worth it.
I wish they would just ditch the igpu thing entirely and leave that job to the graphics card so the CPU can be as good as possible.
The problem with that is, it'll add input lag
If it was a seperate focus from CPU performance, then I would agree.
However, CPU performance chasing seems to have taken a bit of a hit to a wider view of performance, including iGPU... this I dislike.
They should be developing two seperate lines of CPU, one dedicated and the other with iGPU.
Sadly, this is not the route they have chosen.
for a start, battlefield is not very CPU intensive. I play at 2560*1440 on ultra with a 6990 and my CPU (2500K @ 4.8Ghz) hovers around 50-70% usage. Itd be even lower if I bothered closing all the background apps and hw monitoring tools. my GPU(s) are always 95-100% usage.
it would be worth your while upgrading the GPU to a gtx670 maybe. it'll double you're average fps in BF3 and you would carry it over to future builds. you're going to become bottle necked at the CPU, but if you get a £30 cooler and OC it, there's still a lot of life in the q6600 yet. minimum fps will get a nice boost.
on the Sata3 front, outside of benchmarks, there is little real world difference. I move from an Intel 80gb x25m on a sata2 board to a Samsung 830 128gb on sata3 and on paper its worlds apart but in truth my boot times improved a bit and loading big levels in games seemed quicker. you've already got 95% of the benefits of an SSD over a hdd, being super fast access times.
So would people say that it is worth waiting for the Haswell chip? I'm probably going to buy a new setup within the next 6 months but could push it back for the newer chip. (Going from laptop to a gaming pc)
I've basically specked a £800-1000 setup now, which should go down in price by the time I come to buy it.
Well obviously the Haswell is going to be better and more future proof... It just depends on whether you think that you need it NOW or if you can wait another 6-9 months for Haswell. Obviously the Haswell is the better choice but if you want performance increase right now and a overclocked Q6600 is not cutting it for you then an i5/i7 are a pretty big upgrade and overclock well. Personally I would wait but it is entirely up to you and if you need the performance now or you can wait, either choice will be a significant upgrade.