Q6600 or i7 920?

Yannic · 18 Jan 2009 at 14:20

Hi

Im looking to upgrade my athlon 4400+ setup to somthing with a little more umph.

I found a nice combo for roughly £300 (Q6600, cheapest p45 motherboard on ocuk, and 2gb of the geil ram)

but at the same time - I am tempted with going all out on a Core i7 setup (using a 920) After getting the 6gb of ram, the £270 motherboard and the cpu. so roughly spending £700

Is the Core i7 system worth that much more than the Q6600 system? Im just trying to warrant spending the extra £400 on it.

thanks for any advice. I just want my system to be able to do a lot more at the same time than it allready can. like endoding while im playing a game or copying files from rars a lot faster.

rjk · 18 Jan 2009 at 14:27

i7 pounds the q6600

and probably uses less power too!

it depends on what you are using it for

a q9550 would be better than a 6600 imo

CaseyChaos · 18 Jan 2009 at 15:00

If not wanting to spend the extra money I'd go for the q9550 over the q6600, if you have the money though get the i7

DeathTyrant · 18 Jan 2009 at 15:06

Using a single decent GPU card, you won't see too much of a difference. From what I have heard, you really see the benefits of i7 once you use SLI/Xfire.

benwoodcock · 18 Jan 2009 at 15:07

Could you just overcock your current CPU?

AlexTrickle · 18 Jan 2009 at 15:07

If you do things like encoding etc as opposed to just gaming then the i7 will far outstrip the Q6600. However if you just game then probably, as above, the best quad core is the Q9550.

Yannic · 18 Jan 2009 at 15:28

if i went for the i7. Would it matter at the moment if I only ordered 3gb of memory? And in by doing that, could I continue to use my Windows XP 32 bit OS?

That would save me over £100 allready.

willy · 18 Jan 2009 at 17:43

i7 and Q6600 totally different class.
Depend what you use it for, but if you have the money, i would go for i7 as it's the latest one

CaseyChaos · 18 Jan 2009 at 18:35

Yannic said:
if i went for the i7. Would it matter at the moment if I only ordered 3gb of memory? And in by doing that, could I continue to use my Windows XP 32 bit OS?

That would save me over £100 allready.

yeah you could do that but when the time comes you'll have to get a 64bit OS and the extra mem, then have to go through the pain of a fresh install, if you're not thinking about that for a while then it's not so bad

miniyazz · 18 Jan 2009 at 18:55

Yannic said:
but at the same time - I am tempted with going all out on a Core i7 setup (using a 920) After getting the 6gb of ram, the £270 motherboard and the cpu. so roughly spending £700

Why a £270 motherboard? You could get the GA-EX58-UD4 from overclockers for £195.49 at the moment, and it seems a decent enough board. My current "upgrade to i7" cost (including decent mobo, cpu, and 6GB RAM) is on £539.32, but I suppose if you need to buy an OS it would add a bit.

vincent1989 · 18 Jan 2009 at 19:02

core i7 et al is a ridiculous price at the moment purely because it's new tech, do yourself a favour and go with the Q6600 (or even just an E7300 or something) et al, save yourself a packet and then go for i7 (or the next and best thing) during 2010 when the price should have dropped significantly (due to cost of production going down, overstock, etc etc). unless you're doing some serious business then the Q6600 4GB of RAM and a decent mobo will give you far better performance for price.