Q6600 > i5 / i7 setup

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Guest2

Guest2

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I currently have a [email protected], 4gb RAM (4x1GB OCZ PC2 6400) and Gigabyte EP-45-DS3P motherboard.

How much quicker would an i5 / i7 setup be with say 6 or 8gb of RAM?

I have seen there are all sorts of different types of i5 and i7 and dont really have a clue what the differences are, only that some i7s sell for £180 and some new are £800+ :confused:

If I could get cpu, ram and motherboard for around £250 and sell off some of mine I would be happy and it wouldnt cost too much. I dont use my computer for much now really - internet, movies/tv shows and the odd game

Not really sure why I want to upgrade as it works fine, but if I can do it for cheap, then why not
 
_lecro_ said:
Ive got both and the I7 with completely pwn the Q6600
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At what? Bearing in mind that in the past week I have played Quake 1 once and a bit of F1 2011.

I think the only thing it would be useful for, would be SATA 3 for an SSD drive to increase boot speed and playing Starcraft 2, if I gte back into it on larger maps
 
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You have a good rig there I would wait for a while until Ivy Bridge comes out and see what happens then. What sort of games do you play and at what resolution?

Stoner81.
 
if your doing video editing or something along those lines i would upgrade

i went from a q6600 to a i2500k and it does blow the q6600 away

in terms of gaming tho not as much your gfx does all that work
 
If for gaming... don't bother. Spend the cash on another 570 if you want the games to be better.

I also have the same CPU clocked at 3.6 and it makes no difference at all to games when I tried out a 2500K... don't bother.

I also tried converting a bluray rip... When the 2500K was at 40% the Q6600 was at 25% Not what I would call blowing it out the water!

Wait on Ivy as suggested. I am. Even then though, it wont be much of an improvement, I hear they're focussing on GPU power more.
 
Same advice as Stoner81, if it’s running everything ok now hold fire and wait for the Ivy Bridge to be released, also with all the new graphics cards hitting the market soon it may push the price of the ones out now down a little, so you may be able to pick one of them up also at the same time.
 
Buchanan0204 said:
If for gaming... don't bother. Spend the cash on another 570 if you want the games to be better.

I also have the same CPU clocked at 3.6 and it makes no difference at all to games when I tried out a 2500K... don't bother.

I also tried converting a bluray rip... When the 2500K was at 40% the Q6600 was at 25% Not what I would call blowing it out the water!

Wait on Ivy as suggested. I am. Even then though, it wont be much of an improvement, I hear they're focussing on GPU power more.
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I am not out to argue but I went from a Q8400 @ 3.6 to a I5 2500K @ 4.6 and games load a lot quicker (very noticable on BF3)
On saying that though this was a minor thing and easily lived without.

imo you sound content and you are asking if anyone can convince you to upgrade? Not from me as I have not noticed that much of an improvement but Ivybridge is not far away...maybe wait to see then.
 
I was doing a spot of benchmarking the other day, for something else, but this might give you an indication of speed difference in the chip architecture,

I rendered a test scene in 3D studio max and took the render times from a few different rigs and got the following,

E2220 (Conroe) @ 3 ghz with 4Gb of ram.

1116 seconds

QX6700 (Kentsfield) @ 3.2 ghz with 4 Gb of ram

479 Seconds

i7 920 (Bloomfield) @3.8 ghz with 6 Gb of ram (Hyperthreading OFF)

336 Seconds

i7 920 (Bloomfield) @3.8 ghz with 6 Gb of ram (Hyperthreading ON)

257 Seconds


The extra 600mhz makes a difference, but the extra ram has very little effect as the scene was small, but processor intensive.

It saves a bit of time for rendering encoding etc, but for games, I wouldn't bother. For me it was hyperthreading that had the real benefit.

I haven't got a sandybridge i7 to test, although the westmere xeons scale as you'd expect from the extra cores/threads

An SSD makes everything feel much quicker, maybe a better upgrade?
 
flippant said:
An SSD makes everything feel much quicker, maybe a better upgrade?
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That is the suggestion I was going to make. Increasing RAM or thread count won't have as dramatic an effect on the feel/responsiveness of the system as a decent SSD would. A 128GB Crucial M4 would seem to be the ideal choice, and selling off the 150GB Velociraptor would recoup a reasonable percentage of the outlay.
 
Saundie said:
That is the suggestion I was going to make. Increasing RAM or thread count won't have as dramatic an effect on the feel/responsiveness of the system as a decent SSD would. A 128GB Crucial M4 would seem to be the ideal choice, and selling off the 150GB Velociraptor would recoup a reasonable percentage of the outlay.
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I neally bought an M4 the other day, however my motherboard only supports SATA2, so I would need to get a pcie card too, adding another £30 to the expense.

The £30 would be wasted in a year or so time, when I upgrade my motherboard, cpu and ram

OS seems reasonably quick. BootRacer shows time to desktop is 25 seconds - 17 to logon, then another 8 to desktop.

I run Perfect Disk in Stealth mode all the time on all my drives
 
I run a 256gb M4 on Sata2, and it's still pretty quick in comparison to mechanical drives, I have a rig with a couple WD blacks in raid 0, and it feels a lot less snappy, especially opening things like photoshop.

Level load times in BF3 seem to take forever when I'm not using a rig with an SSD in it.
 
The main benefit of an SSD is the low access times, not transfer rates. Running an SSD off of a SATA2 controller will merely limit the amount of bandwidth available to the drive, which is of little consequence for day to day tasks. I don't mean to be dismissive, but I don't really see the relevance of boot speed - you typically turn your computer on only once a day, after all. You'll no doubt open and switch between application all day long, though, and that's where the advantages of the SSD are felt.

It's difficult to explain to somebody who's never used a system with an SSD in it, though as you use a Velociraptor you've no doubt seen the effect of access times on the responsiveness compared to a 7200RPM drive. My laptop has a 128GB Crucial C300 in it, and it is just as responsive as my Core i7 system in typical usage such as web browsing and Office applications, despite it having only an ancient Core 2 Duo.

Just to be clear, I am not suggesting that you will be blown away by an SSD, but it will make a tangible and (in my humble but honest opinion) worthwhile difference.
 
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