thinking of upgrade. worth it?

shadowake said:
There would be a performance increase but nothing spectacular.

It depends if you really want to upgrade to a newer socket/have the cash to do so.

What are your full curent system specs? We might be able to sugest a couple of cheap upgrades.
Click to expand...

system specs in sig. im thinking bout getting a p45 mobo instead to clock my cpu higher. ive hit a wall with this one. the only other thing i thought of trying was moving from 4 sticks of ram to 2
 
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id tried to overclock that Q6600 more... 3.6ghz? if you on no volt increase at the moment, temps/cooler willing wack the volts up abit :p

your system looks perfectly ok i wouldnt waste money unnecessarily

EDIT: you hit a wall? have you tried upping the vcore?
 
yep i agree with above i have the q6600 and the p5q pro board overclocked to 3.4ghz at minute with a artic cooler to help it along.just invested in a gtx285 so this pc gonna go well for a while now,just wish it would go to 3.6ghz not tried yet tho.
 
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my ram wont even get to 800mhz ram and it fails prime so i dont think thats the problem. ive heard the 965 chipsets are pants for quads but i dunno how much truth there is in that.
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buy some dominator ram 4gb pretty cheap at minute and comes with a fan if you need it i want to overclock the ram but need advice on that bit as anit got a clue
 
The Q6600's do have 'black spots' where they wont hit a certain GHz, but up the FSB and eventually it will become stable again. Mine wouldn't sit at 2.8 but sits happily at 2.9-3.2!
 
well ive taken 2 sticks out and to get it to boot at 3.2 i need to put around 1.3 volts in it altho temps are a bit high for my liking. 50c idle. this is manually setting as auto setting it wont even boot,
 
Whoa lots of ideas from people. His board doesn't support 1066mhz ram, so that's a pretty poor solution.

I'm with you on 965 chipset being the problem. Quads are difficult to overclock at the best of times, they've hit the limit of what fsb can do. I'm on a P45 board and it struggles, X38 boards don't tend to make it over 420 fsb. The gigabyte you're on doesn't stand a chance.

You could change board. This is a fairly drastic measure when looking for an extra 600mhz. So yes, if you are unhappy with current performance, I believe you're going to want to upgrade ram/motherboard/cpu. Beyond that, choose your poison. Q9550 are beautiful and pretty cheap at present, otherwise phenom 2 or i7. Significant point is that you don't need an entire new system, your case/gfx card etc are fine

50c idle is a very bad thing. Under load thats going to be very hot. I think you're better off leaving it at 3ghz
 
An x48 board will do a better job than the current one, but a worse one than a P45 board.
At 2 quid more, http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MB-280-AS is a better call.

The Asus p5q range are all rather good, and cover a very wide range of prices and features. The very bottom end one has the atx power connector in a ridiculous place and is worth avoiding for that reason.

What ram do you have at the moment? To hit the limits of a q9550 you'll be at 472mhz or so, which is asking a lot of 800mhz ram. A p5q board and a 2x2gb set of 1066mhz ram will get everything your q6600 has to give out of it. Second hand also viable, you've got access to the members market by now
 
perhaps its better for me to go am3 then. if ive gotta get mobo, ram and poss a cpu then i may as well. ill check out the mm tho.

what are the new amd x4 phenoms like? i only game and a bit of web browsing so i dont think i need a i7
 
Its fairly hard to find anything you need an i7 for. Ripping films very very fast seems to be their forte.

AM3 is almost exactly the same speed as Intel quad core. AMD have caught up, just a generation late. They use ddr3, which makes no difference whatsoever. They overclock reasonably well. Price is similar. Any particular preferance? I prefer intel, that you have the q6600 already would sell it for me.

On the other hand, your q6600 was until recently worth about 100 in members market. Your ram and motherboard are probably not worth much, but 130 or so off the price of a new bundle is significant. Hard to say

I think most sensible is the amd tri core or intel dual core. It'll overclock high without becoming obscenely hot, fairly easily. Performance will beat the quad you're used to by a reasonable margin once you get around 4ghz or so. Depends how you feel about dropping one or two cores though
 
id consider tri core provided it clocks high but ideally id like quad. perhaps its worth me sticking with what i have now. id doesnt struggle to run anything really. i just wanna get past 3.5 ghz
 
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