Q9650 or i7

[liscoe]

Hi,

I am in the process of upgrading from a Q6700 (overclocked at 3.3 gHz) and am wondering whether to buy a Q9650 or to go the whole hog and get an i7 2600K or 950 which means I also have to upgrade motherboard RAM etc (although at surprisingly little difference in cost given that I can sell my old hardware).

The setup would be as follows:

All the below would have:
1x GTX570
SSD 64GB
Windows 7 64

1)
Q9650
EP45-UD3R Gigabyte P45 motherboard
8GB DDR2

2)
i7 2600K
Gigabyte GA-PH67-UD3 Intel H67
4GB DDR3

3)
i7 950
Gigabyte GA-X58-USB3 Intel X58
6GB DDR3

I would be overclocking, not sure about the i7's but would hope to get the Q9650 up to 3.8 or 4 ghz on air.

I know the i7 is newer and faster than the Q9650 and my question is really whether I will actually see the performance gain from the i7 given the games that I play. The only reason I am upgrading (sad I know!) is my heavily modded oblivion runs at 10-30fps on the Q6700 (even with the GTX570 already in use) and any of the above three processors will improve this.

Oblivion being old isn't too bothered about quads/hyperthreading etc and I don't know whether I will get any noticable performance gain from an i7 (and if so which out of the 2600K/950 is best) as opposed to a Q9650, the only other game I play is Supreme Commander and the main bottleneck with this is other peoples pc's on the net...

My only other concern when if moving to the i7 is that I have a rather old (4years+) coolermaster case and am not sure if the socket 1155 or 1366 motherboard will fit in it.

Apologies for length of post, thanks in advance for the help!

 

[Nocky24]

A few things you need to remember:

P67/H67 boards only for 2600K and other Sandy Bridge cpus

H67 boards limit overclocking so there's no point getting an unlocked (K) chip.

Sandy Bridge is dual channel

X58 for 950

X58 is tri channel

Personally I'd decide whether you really need HT first and if not the i5 2500K will perform just as well. However Bulldozer isn't far away so if you can wait, I'd hang on a while longer

EDIT: just seen you put a Q9650 down as an option, no real point in upgrading to that over your current quad. Your q6700 oc'd is still good enough for most games so I'd say wait at least until Bulldozer and review the situation then.

 

[slim01]

wait for bulldozer if u can, otherwise the i 2500k is storming everything else. the new i7s look great too from my research

 

[liscoe]

Thanks for your advice guys but you've not really answered my question:

I do need a new processor as my Q6700 is limiting Oblivion.

Is there any gain to be had for modded Oblivion with the new i7's or will I not notice a difference from a OC'd Q9650?

Thanks!

 

[LEUVEN]

Hi,I know the i7 is newer and faster than the Q9650 and my question is really whether I will actually see the performance gain from the i7 given the games that I play. The only reason I am upgrading (sad I know!) is my heavily modded oblivion runs at 10-30fps on the Q6700 (even with the GTX570 already in use) and any of the above three processors will improve this.
help!

Are you 100% certain that it's your CPU holding you back?

How much RAM have you currently got/are using? (couldn't see any mention of this)

Having something like a Logitech G15 Keyboard for example can monitor RAM and CPU performance in-game, or using a program like Everest combined with the G15 can show GPU usage aswell as all kind of loads/temps etc.

The reason I say this is because when I was playing GTA4 last year it was very laggy and the FPS were very poor.
Using the G15 I could see CPU usage of around 15/20% IIRC while RAM usage was hovering around 97% and therefore must have been using the pagefile on the HDD.
So out came the 4GB of Dual Channel RAM and in went the 6GB Tri Channel RAM and the game was much smoother with around 5GB of RAM usage.
A lot of people on here have wrongly claimed 4GB is more than enough for gaming too.

Edit: if you can sell your old kit for a decent amount and can afford it then go for it, I too would wait a while for Bulldozer if you can, like others have said.

 

[Nocky24]

Thanks for your advice guys but you've not really answered my question:

I do need a new processor as my Q6700 is limiting Oblivion.

Is there any gain to be had for modded Oblivion with the new i7's or will I not notice a difference from a OC'd Q9650?

Thanks!

In that case if you are experiencing a bottleneck an i5 2500K would be a great choice coupled with a decent P67 board if you really want something now. HT isn't neccesary for gaming. Please note that the SB boards have a defect (nothing major, just the sata 3 ports) and a replacement program will be put in place around April/May I believe. However you may still want to see what Bulldozer brings to the table and decide then, having said that the 2500K is no slouch by all means.

 

[liscoe]

Thanks for the help chaps.

In answer to Leuven's questions am am pretty sure that it is my processor as I've been doing some monitoring using Rivatuner and others. I have 4GB of dual channel RAM at the moment and am going to upgrade to 8 if I stick with the Q9650. Problem is that as Oblivion is so old it doesn't really take advantage of quad cores/lots of RAM etc (although there are some reasonably successful ways arround these probems).

The investigations that I've done and the advice that I've been given suggest that it is indeed a processor bottleneck- Oblivion (being so old) resonds best to high processor speeds rather than than the ability to spread threads across multiple cores. This is why I think an overclocked Q9650 with it's 12 meg of L2 cache will be just or almost as effective as an i7.

I think what I'll do is save a little bit of money and just upgrade to the Q9650 for the moment and keep an eye out for bulldozer when it appears. If the Q9650 can run Oblivion fine then there's no point in me upgrading for a few more years, otherwise I'll sell my hardware in a few months and get something brand new!

Thanks again for the advice.

 

[chipps101]

clock for clock a quad core i5 750 is faster than a q9650 and you will probably be able to get one cheaper than a q9650 as people will be upgrading to sandy bridge so you may want to consider those also.

 

[Redmint]

I personally wouldn't suggest going for the Q9650 option, as you've said the newer options are basically just as cheap after you've sold your old stuff, also the new motherboards will have nice options such as SLI/SATA 6gb/s

 

[Antx777]

I had a QX9650, fine CPU. However, it was other components that let it down like slow ram, "poor" MOBO? (Striker II formula), old this, old that (hd etc). This is usually what happens when upgrading to a new pc, you find yourself upgrading everything else - a progression..

 

[Kanpai]

Have you tried overclocking the Q6700 to 3.6ghz? If not give that a try maybe it will help.

 

[liscoe]

Thanks for everyones input. I have read up about the i7's and the sandybridge certainly looks like the best option, great overclocking too!

I'll see if I can sell my old MB RAM and Q6700 for a decent price and get the 2500K or 2600K.

Thanks again for your assistance

 

[koooowweeee]

not read all the thread (sorry drunk)

iwent from a 9550@4ghz to a i7 920 and i ran 3dmark and i got a higher score on the i7 920 stock with same card than a q9550 clocked at 4ghz (1000 points extra)

says its all (weather its not real life benches or not)

 

[Gin0rm0]

The I7 would be a more noticable upgrade. Q6700 to Q9650 probably not worth it.