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Q6600 upgrade

~Dockie

~Dockie

~Dockie

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Joined
12 Sep 2012
Posts
896
Hi.

Im looking to upgrade my Q6600 to something with a little more grunt. I've found a Phenom2 1045t along with an asrock 970 pro3 motherboard for a little over £140 and wondered if it would be a suitable upgrade. It might be worth noting that i dont know much about how AMD processors perform, nor the Intel processors past the Core2 range.

My budget is £150 (i could maybe go to £170 if needed), im needing a new motherboard along with the cpu.

It needs to have ddr3 ram (most motherboards nowadays are, i assume), along with 2 pci-e slots for a future crossfire. Also, preferably quad core or more, but im open to being convinced otherwise for that.

Current specs are:
Q6600 w/ Corsair H60
G41MT-S2PT << i think this is whats holding back the overclock, but not sure.
4GB kingston 1333Mhz ram (upgrading to 8GB corsair vengeance 1600 Mhz)
Sapphire HD6870
128GB kingston SSD
1TB samsung H3
2x DVD-RW
OCZ gamexstream 600W

I'm not looking for the best of the best, i know £150 wont get me that, just something that will be enough for the next year or two. It's going to be a gaming pc mainly (again, not looking for maxed out settings for everything) along with video converting, and general usage (web browsing, word documents, etc).

Thanks.
 
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Give the 1045 a little clocking love and it wont be too far short of what AMD are flogging people as new tech now.
Surely selling a Q6600 & mobo will net you £80-£100, so you'll only be £40-£60 out of pocket?

No brainer?
 
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Whatever i get, i'm looking to overclock, hopefully into the 3.2-3.5Ghz range if possible.

I will be selling the Q6600 and motherboard, along with a few other pieces (4GB ram, DVD Writer, Case, possibly a small hdd too) and all in im hoping the upgrade will pay for most of itself. But unfortunately i have other expenses coming within the next 2-3 weeks, which is why im trying not to spend too much.
 
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Well, with that budget and wanting to overclock means no Intel. The cheapest Intel overclockable CPU on it's own is already over your £150 budget and you'd need a motherboard too. Problem is while AMD let you overclock, their performance has slipped so far behind that it hardly matters.

Due to lack competition, Intel were able to effectively kill off old fashioned overclocking from Sandy Bridge onwards so the days of taking their cheaper CPUs and clocking them like mad are over. Intel OC is not fun anymore :-(
 
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I think your money is better left saved for Ivybridge or Haswell. Q6600 is still pretty good especially at 3.2GHz which is easy to achieve. I only just upgraded to Ivy and can only tell the difference in games. If you saved another £100 you could get a D3H and 2500k £264.37 and be set for ages...just my opinion.
 
As above. If you have a Q6600 first thing you should do is overclock it. Depending on which stepping it is you should be looking at 3.2Ghz - 3.5Ghz. From on overclocked Q6600 you should really only be looking at a jump to even a 2nd hand SB/IB to make it worth your while money wise.
 
a 1045 won't be much of an upgrade for a Q6600 at all, hence why you can still sell your Q6600 for close to what a 1045 will cost you to buy

what graphics card do you have?

a Q6600 overclocked will support up to a 570/580 without any real bottlenecking unless it's a severely CPU dependent game so you might be better off with an overclock and GPU upgrade rather than CPU
 
andybird123 said:
what graphics card do you have?
Click to expand...

Currently a HD6870, but I wanted to crossfire them which would requre a new motherboard anyway (mine only has 1 pci-e port, sorry i should have mentioned it, but was half asleep at the time of posting.)

wam7 said:
As above. If you have a Q6600 first thing you should do is overclock it. Depending on which stepping it is you should be looking at 3.2Ghz - 3.5Ghz.
Click to expand...

Its a G0 stepping, but im having trouble getting it past the 3Ghz mark. I dont know if its a ram speed issue or motherboard, but something doesnt like it.
I have some more ram on the way (8 GB corsair vengeance 1600mhz ddr3) so if i can pick up a decent 775 motherboard that supports ddr3 and, hopefully, a second pci-e port, for £80, that would probably be another option to look at, But i cant seem to find many to fit that spec.

Ill edit my first post to reflect my current system specs.

Thanks for the replys aswell, its all definately things to consider.
 
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P35C-DS3R goes on ebay, but just one PCI-E 1 x16, better off at 3GHz and waiting lol. Save your cash for a proper upgrade! :D Spending 50 odd quid to gain 300MHz which doesn't make a lot of difference on a Q6600 is a waste of time n money.

Extra £100 over your budget gets you PCI 3.0, USB 3.0, Sata3, lower power consumption, more future proof and less £ wasted. Q6600 at 3GHz is decent till you can get better imo.
 
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BrianB said:
P35C-DS3R goes on ebay, but just one PCI-E 1 x16, better off at 3GHz and waiting lol. Save your cash for a proper upgrade! :D Spending 50 odd quid to gain 300MHz which doesn't make a lot of difference on a Q6600 is a waste of time n money.

Extra £100 over your budget gets you PCI 3.0, USB 3.0, Sata3, lower power consumption, more future proof and less £ wasted. Q6600 at 3GHz is decent till you can get better imo.
Click to expand...

+1

I think you're better off saving up a bit longer and doing a more meaningful upgrade. The Q6600 is a great CPU, I still have one at home in my wife's desktop. Maybe do a fresh windows install that usually make a PC feel at least 100% faster :-)
 
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