q9550 still going

Associate
Joined
21 Jun 2010
Posts
787
Location
infornt of my PC
Hey another year nearly over and my almost 7 year old rig with a q9550 is still going strong. That is unheard of for me as I used to re build after 2-3 years.
I have estimated this machine has a runtime of 35000 hours with no hardware failures. Pretty impressive huh?

Do I retire it in 2014 and build something new (around £1500) or
do I not spend anything and keep running this machine?

If I do re build, is there a way to transfer my windows 7 settings easily as I have a lot of software and add-ons running that has been nicely configured?
 
Ask yourself, is it too slow for what you do with.

35,000 hours is pretty decent, though my 2600k is on about 24,000 hours and only 2.7 years old :D

unfortunately it's probably best to reinstall from scratch. Then compare with the old one. Any automated transfer would need to be checked anyway and will probably miss things.

Just installed a Q9550 and Q9540 at work, replacing some E3300. ^_^
 
I felt the same with my old Q6600, a few months back I eventually upgraded to an i5 2500k, as it only cost me like £150 by the time I'd sold the old gear.

The performance increase is there, it's not night and day though. My GPU is probably holding me back in games now though.

If I were you I'd keep hold of what you have if you're happy with the performance.
 
Q9550 is ok, I use one in my HTPC built out of old parts but it does hold back allot of games with my HD7850.

I wouldn't have one in my main system.
 
im waiting until next year for ddr 4 and 8 core haswell-e i7s to upgrade my cpu, only then i feel it will be worthwhile and last as long as my i7 920 has! everything now just wont give a decent enough performance increase. i just upgraded my 6950 to a radeon r9 290 and games are now 150% faster, still dont feel like i have a cpu bottleneck at all. bf4 was struggling to maintain 30 fps on a mixture of high/ultra and reduced aa, now it runs at 50-80 fps all on ultra! very nice upgrade.

yeah so maybe do exactly that if games aren't running as fast as you like upgrade the gpu, and that will fix most games, if your willing to spend out on a haswell-e rig next year wait for that otherwise might as well build a 4770k rig now!
 
Last edited:
Those core 2 quads are still pretty good. I've got a Q6600 that's been running 24/7 for about 6 years now that's still going strong, which is about 50,000 hours now.
 
No sense to ask anyone else how you'd like to use your own PC :) If it handles things well, so no reason to upgrade, nobody knows what you are doing @ home with your PC :D
Regarding to new setup - Windows 7 (and other soft) clean installation is required. But you might keep old harddrive and do some tricks that sometimes work: make a copy of freshly installed software, including its settings (Users/AppData, MyDocuments, ProgramData, registry keys etc) and copy appropriate directories from old harddrive. Check if that works; if not = restore back-uped copy. It might not work if: some libraries or files or even different programs that store multiple configs = are missing (so install them manually), if you've done different drive organisation (like partition letters), or if you didn't find appropriate config files prior copying files from old haddrive - needed for correct startup.
 
maybe an ssd upgrade? and start doing your settings/addons the way you have it set up on it? so when you upgrade or make a new build, you can transfer that ssd to the new one and update drivers?
 
just retire my q9550 oc to 3.4ghz as for my gaming needs it was starting to hold me back to increase the oc on my striker II extreme is a real pain in the back side as it really tempermental just getting it to 3.4ghz took me months, so while the prices were right in the black Friday deals I decide to upgraded to i7 4770k,gigabyte z87x-oc force, Samsung evo 250gb ssd, team Vulcan 8gb 2400mhz, as haswell-e, x99 and ddr4 won't be hitting consumers until the q4 of 2014. I haven't gotten around to oc the 4770k yet as it was only installed yesterday so I spend most of today installing update, office and bf4.
 
Yup still going strong and with the 570 gpu, I can play my games at a decent level without worry :) The SSD I bought a year ago gave my PC a new lease of life for speed.
 
Back
Top Bottom