Q6600: upgrade to downgrade?

[Skumball]

I'm looking to buy a Q6600, 8800 GTS, 2gig PC4200 and will primarily be gaming, but also encoding video etc. You can see my current spec in my sig.

Question is, I don't plan to overclock, so will I actually see a decrease in performance with recent games that do not use multiple cores?

 

[peetee]

in a word... NO.
raw MHZ dont translate between a lot of CPUs, newer CPUs can do the workload at a lower frequency due to better architecture etc(something like that).
Ontop of this you're going 8800 + 2gb of ram.
Prepare to gain fps.
Still recommended to read overclocking threads though, for minimal effort and no real risk you could gain a wee bit more performance, just for extra value for money.

 

[stickroad]

A Core 2 Duo running at 2.4GHZ would beat your CPU down to the ground over and over nevermind a Quad Core.

Unlike the NetBurst architecture of Pentium 4 or Pentium D branded processors, the Core architecture does not stress extremely high clock speeds, but rather improvements in the processor's usage of both available clock cycles and power.

So yes it will be an vast improvment over your old CPU.

 

[easyrider]

At the OP your current CPU is slow by todays C2D chips never mind quadcore.

 

[Skumball]

Thanks people. That's reassured me quite a lot.

 

[Minstadave]

Why the PC4200 RAM out of interest? Thats pretty slow by today's standards, you should be aiming for PC5300 as a minimum really.

 

[Tetras]

Why the PC4200 RAM out of interest? Thats pretty slow by today's standards, you should be aiming for PC5300 as a minimum really.

Aye, especially if you plan to upgrade to 1333 FSB CPUs in the future, they need PC2-5300 / 667 Mhz RAM to run sync with FSB. Price difference is minimal too.

 

[mattyrigby00]

no the newer processors have much better "power" per clock, and go for better ram, the crucial ballistix 5300 is good for overclocking apparently