Q6600 to I3 = Waste of time

FatRakoon

FatRakoon

FatRakoon

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Oh heck, that was a waste of time.

I just got hold of a little I3 530, and an Asus Mobo with 2x2GB Kingston HyperX

I am thinking of giving it to my eldest son, who is running a Q6600 in a Gigabyte DS4 Mobo with 4x1GB, also HyperX, but DDR2 not DDR3

Ok, so we are dropping from 4 too 2 cores, but with the Hyperthreading malarky, thats kind of as good... ish... sort of!

Anyway using Windows' own experience chart, I re-run the test both before and after installing the new bits and before, I was getting 6.8 6.8 6.9 6.9 and 6.0 but afterwards the CPU went up by 0.1 to 6.9 however the RAM fell all the way down a huge 0.9 to 5.9 and the HD also dropped down to 5.9 too! - The GFX tests stayed at 6.9

Im lookin gat the RAM and they are both Kingston HyperX. The Q6600 was running 4 sticks 1GB DDR2 8500 and the I3 is running 2 sticks of DDR3 1333Mhz

So either

1 - DDR3 is no faster than DDR2
2 - The Motherboard is crap compared to the Gigabyte ( I hate Asus and love gigabyte funnily enough )
3 - The I3 really isnt all that much of a CPU
4 - Im a nob and Im doing summat wrong.
 
Ignore windows experience index or whatever it's called.

Overall you may find that performance in real world stuff may be similar in games and such.
 
Several points here: firstly, don't use windows experience chart to judge anything - it's rubbish. Hyper-threading is not as good as having additional cores, it's basically a way of gaining performance on the cores you do have by running an extra thread on them in applications that are heavily parallel processed, such as rendering. However the i3 is a newer generation of chip, and as such it's architecture will be faster, use less power etc. as well as being a better overclocker.

If you're using an after market cooler I'd suggest pushing the chip a bit before you write it off.
 
Aye, but bear in mind Windows Experience Index is a pile of haddock. Don't take its result to heart.

But to be fair, a 1st generation i3 like the 530 isn't really any better than a Q6600 (see here for a performance comparison). In lightly threaded applications the i3 will be a fair bit faster - while in multithreaded apps the Q6600 is going to win. The new generation i3 2000 series sandy bridge are a bit of a different story though - but I guess getting one of these would have cost a lot more than a i3 530 and s1156 board.

So basically you made a bit of a side-grade, at least you can sell on the DDR2 and Q6600 and make a bit of money back. Also, as he is now on DDR3 memory upgrades will be much cheaper.
 
clock it to 3.3 and windowns will say 7.1

sell the q6600 for £60 sell the ddr2 for £30 sell the i3 530 for £55 that the price's they sell at now on an aution site..

and you can get a i5 750 for £80 or i7 870 for £120. they will both give you a big :D over the q6600's power
 
I wasnt expecting a massive jump, please dont get me wrong.

I was expecting an improvement though.

I am also not expectign it to compare at all with a Quad core, heck no, but I was expecting a bit more than I have had.

When it comes to the nitty gritty, I was certainly not expecting the RAM to show me what it did... That I was certainly taken back by.

The Q6600 already has a home. I was only using that as a comparison because both my sons have Q6600 PCs and one has DDR2 in a DS4 and the other has DDR3 in a DS3 and I have done comparisons of those 2 but now I wanted to add the i3 into the mix and run some tests on that.

I have 3 kids, each with half decent PCs and I myself have 4 full setups ( I think I am a hoarder of computers ) so, no, it wont be gettign sold off anytime soon.

Although I have given serious thought to selling this i3 setup off however an upping my AMD to 6 cores ( My AMD I bought purely because its a 9550 in a DS3 - I have an Intel 9550 in a DS3 too! - I love the DS3 range and I have 4 of them in all and all are different )

Anyway, I am waffling.

I got this I3 and it was originally at 3.8Ghz and so I will up it a touch and give its a run and get back.
 
FatRakoon said:
When it comes to the nitty gritty, I was certainly not expecting the RAM to show me what it did... That I was certainly taken back by.
Click to expand...

Aye, you would expect even in a silly app like WEI to not see a drop in the RAM score. Perhaps the sticks are not running in dual channel mode. You can check this by opening up CPU-Z and looking in the Memory tab.
 
cmndr_andi said:
Aye, you would expect even in a silly app like WEI to not see a drop in the RAM score. Perhaps the sticks are not running in dual channel mode. You can check this by opening up CPU-Z and looking in the Memory tab.
Click to expand...

yes he's right i have the lowest ddr 1600mhz ram you can get i have windows 7.6 so with 1333 you should see 7.1 ish.

have you put the rame in the same colourer slots. i lot or ppl put it side by side but on intel you miss a slot.
 
Its definitely dual channel yes, Although according to CPUZ they are in slots 2 & 4

I will swap the slots over shortly.

I have just converted an AVI to DVD and it went fairly quickly.

This one seemed to settle in at 140FPS and I am sure that the Q6600 was rarely going over 100 so its still a boost.

He only really plays a few basic games anyway, so its still a step in the right direction.
 
Dave0w said:
clock it to 3.3 and windowns will say 7.1

sell the q6600 for £60 sell the ddr2 for £30 sell the i3 530 for £55 that the price's they sell at now on an aution site..

and you can get a i5 750 for £80 or i7 870 for £120. they will both give you a big :D over the q6600's power
Click to expand...


It's a waste of time. Even when i made the change 14 months ago it was the most pointless upgrade i have ever made but really only did it so that i could still sell my 775 stuff for decent money. I came from a Q9550 at 4Ghz with a P5Q Pro Turbo and 4GB of Gskill pc2-8500 and have noticed practically no performance gain. It may be there in benchies but it's hardly noticeable in day to day tasks.
 
Thats kind of like when I got the AMD Phenom. I had both an Intel 9550 and an AMD 9550, and both were in DS3 Motherboards... Completely different I know, but I compared the two and while benches showed X or Y Differences, real world use was very near to ZERO difference at all.

Much of the improvements in PCs these days are really down to either Placaebo or simply fanboy bias ... ( Thats why I still use and love my Atari computers )

---

Right, been toying about just now. The Kingston DDR2 is 7200 not 8500... The 8500 is the OCZ... My bad. But they are only running as 6400 anyway so not that it will make any difference.

Ok, I have, another pair of DDR3 RAM that I might or might not try out... If they work, I might try to use them alongside the kingston to give the PC 6GB rather than have them sat on the side for yonks like they have been.

I have also noticed that the Motherboard is eating up some of the RAM. I am left with marginally over 3GB.

I saw this in the BIOS and Windows ( Win7/64 ) knows its 4GB and that 3.05 is useable so how the hell can I get that RAM back? Not that its the cause of the drop in speed, but come on...

The Mobo is an ASUS P7-H55-M

Nothign is obvious in the BIOS
 
RAM shouldn't score that low ?!

I've got a poorly Celeron G530 with the Genesis grey (1600 upped to 1866 XMP) and it scores a whopping 7.9

Processor wise you've probably downgraded but memory should be a big bump up. Read/write speeds should be double what they were on socket 775.

Get yourself everest and start benchmarking and checking speeds

EDIT: My bad - You boys are talking about Socket 1156 - Is it really that bad ? I totally ignored this platform as being an unviable upgrade at the time
 
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I have a core i3 540 running at 3.6ghz and both processor and memory score 7.1

Will run up to 4.0ghz and find it great for what i use my pc for.
 
Hmm.. Well, I have been through the BIOS, and sure enough the BIOS is fairly complex compared to pretty much every other board that I have, but there is still nothing in there thats obvious to me that will help.

Admittedly, Im running everything pretty much at stock.

I did realise that I was running FAH with the SMP switch and so on remembering how badly FAH ran on my first ever HT CPU ( Prescott 660 ) I thought that maybe this thing is doing the same thing ?

But no, I re-ran the test and no difference.

I have toyed with the RAM a little and now its up to 3.87GB useable ( Better than 3.05 ) and I am still seriously considering trying out the other 2x1GB just to see... Given how poor this RAM is running, its not really going to bother me that much if I get some performance hit is it?

Yeah, even my 2.2Ghz AMD is giving me a 7.1 RAM score. I had just checked that out.

I think that AMD is going to have to be my next move I recon.
 
FatRakoon said:
Oh heck, that was a waste of time.

Anyway using Windows' own experience chart, I re-run the test both before and after installing the new bits and before, I was getting 6.8 6.8 6.9 6.9 and 6.0 but afterwards the CPU went up by 0.1 to 6.9 however the RAM fell all the way down a huge 0.9 to 5.9 and the HD also dropped down to 5.9 too! - The GFX tests stayed at 6.9


4 - Im a nob and Im doing summat wrong.
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You did a fresh install of windows right?
 
Windows experience index is not worth checking.

but upgrading from q6600 to i3 530 probs isn't worth it.
 
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