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q9550 to i7 now? worth it?

Nocky24

Nocky24

Nocky24

Soldato
Joined
19 May 2009
Posts
3,113
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Cannock
Would it be worth changing my current cpu (q9550) to say an i7 920? I'm looking to get more fps out of my gaming more than anything to be honest. I currently have a 4870 gpu as well. I'm mainly concerned about my q9550 starting to bottleneck future gfx cards and this seems to be the best time (if any) to sell off skt 775 stuff. What do you reckon? please help :)
 
In my humble opinion Nocky i don't think the cost of upgrading to I7 will really warrant the gains for games which would be pretty minimal , personally i would just spend the money on a shiney new card (5870 when available perhaps) what card have you got atm? . Also i'm presuming you have the 9450 oc'd?
 
Your current cpu won't be a bottle neck, and no games that i know of would totally utilise the I7's 8threads, id have to say save the money from not upgrading and get one of the newer Ati cards or even wait for the newer nvidia cards, you will gain more from them, then a move over to I7.
 
I run computationally intense programs, the sort of things that really loves cpu speed. And I noticed very little difference moving from q9550 to i7 920, both at around the 4ghz mark.

I say with complete confidence that you will notice no difference moving from q9550 to i7. Games are gpu bound more than cpu limited unless playing on very low resolutions. If however you are unwisely running the q9550 at 2.83ghz you will notice a difference overclocking it to 3.8, though in games the improvement may well be negligible.

If you want to throw money at the computer, next gen graphics cards or an ssd are better ideas. The former makes everything prettier, the latter makes everything load faster.

Socket 775 has been going down in value for a while now, I can't see it being worth less in a years time. X58 will devalue swiftly from here as everyone seems enamoured with P55 and the i5. So from the perspective of resale, it still doesn't make now a good time to upgrade :)
 
I personally did the same upgrade. Q9550 - i7 920. JonJ678 is correct , its not huge gaps between them in every day computing. The i7 does however outperform much more in most heavy encoding , anything HD and winrar based work areas.

I personally upgraded not to get a huge jump in performance but to keep my system up to date for a good few years as i had the funds at that time. Im now on a new 1366 socket and i have options for the future it seems. The 775 will be phased out with no new cpus to be launched for that platform.

If you can obtain a decent OC from your Q9550 then its going to help. I personally had 3.4ghz and it was still very fast indeed.

If funds are tight then stay as you are buddy for now.

McT
 
Excellent thanks for the replies people, i just thought my cpu was going to start lagging behind if i put in a new 5xxx gpu. Cheers, great community and knowledge as always!
 
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