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Worth upgrading to Q9450?

ElectroGloop

ElectroGloop

ElectroGloop

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Joined
20 Apr 2008
Posts
21
I have an overclocked E6750 (3.4Ghz) which seems to be pretty good but I'd like a bit more performance in games like Bad Company 2 or Crysis 2. Would a Q9450 give much of a performance boost in these games?

I do plan on upgrading my whole system at some point (hopefully for BF3) and going to Sandy Bridge. Is it worth getting a second hand Q9450 before I do an upgrade, or should I just wait?
 
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I was considering upgrading to a quad recently as well.
Currently runnign a E8400 @3.6Ghz, can push to 4.1Ghz easily
Just wondering how much more effective the extra cores would be over the extra speed

can't really justify SB atm due to the games I play being mainly wow lol and a little bit of bc2
 
ElectroGloop said:
I have an overclocked E6750 (3.4Ghz) which seems to be pretty good but I'd like a bit more performance in games like Bad Company 2 or Crysis 2. Would a Q9450 give much of a performance boost in these games?

I do plan on upgrading my whole system at some point (hopefully for BF3) and going to Sandy Bridge. Is it worth getting a second hand Q9450 before I do an upgrade, or should I just wait?
Click to expand...

i made a swtich form e6750 oc at 3.6ghz to q9550 oc 3.82. it didnt make to much difference for any games. so if you are doing it for games, i suggest save the cash for sandy bridge
 
vian_siu said:
i made a swtich form e6750 oc at 3.6ghz to q9550 oc 3.82. it didnt make to much difference for any games. so if you are doing it for games, i suggest save the cash for sandy bridge
Click to expand...

Ok thanks. To be honest, most games run fine. It's just Bad Company 2, which benefits from a dual core more than any other game I've seen.

I might just overclock a bit more and then just hold out for SB towards the end of the year.
 
I agree with the difference being minimal in games, I went from a E8400 @ 4.2 to a Q9550 @ 4.1.
I did it for games which were supposed to benefit, i.e. BC2, GTA IV.
Not worth it.
Not liking the quad much apart from the fact it is a quad. :)
This comment may seem a bit vague, though the quad makes a clicking noise in my mb, which it never made with my duo and seems to stall for a split second sometimes.
The duo @4.2 with the extra 50 FSB was noticeably quicker on the desktop.
 
my q9450, if it at stock, sees 90%+ cpu usage in BC2, although I am not sure how much of that is to do with QUAD SLI.
My friend went from a C2D to a Q6600 recently and BC2 has benefited quite a lot from it (so he says, i havent seen it before and after so meh).

If you have an SSD everything will be instant in windows desktop anyway, you do not need the extra speed, its only when you start using programs that if they are single core only they will prefer higher clocks, but there aren't that many programs that are cpu limited by the speed of modern quads, except those that already utilize all cores/threads.
 
Personally I'd go for something a bit higher spec, or just wait a little while for amd's new offerings or maybe sandy. But if you do want a Q9450, I have one in the MM right now. Although I don't think you have access yet going by your post count.
 
mothermachine said:
Personally I'd go for something a bit higher spec, or just wait a little while for amd's new offerings or maybe sandy. But if you do want a Q9450, I have one in the MM right now. Although I don't think you have access yet going by your post count.
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Yeah, I was just thinking about this one as it's the same socket so I wouldn't need to upgrade anything else and was hoping it would give a decent performance increase in bad company 2.

I think I may wait for BF3 to arrive and see what kind of computer that needs to run smoothly.

I was told that there was a Q9450 in the marketplace by a friend who has enough posts to see that section. That kind of prompted me to ask the question to be honest :)
 
ElectroGloop said:
Yeah, I was just thinking about this one as it's the same socket so I wouldn't need to upgrade anything else and was hoping it would give a decent performance increase in bad company 2.

I think I may wait for BF3 to arrive and see what kind of computer that needs to run smoothly.

I was told that there was a Q9450 in the marketplace by a friend who has enough posts to see that section. That kind of prompted me to ask the question to be honest :)
Click to expand...

Ah well there ya go :) I also have a QX9650 in there as well. Vastly better chip IMO.
 
Given how well they are holding their value I would wait until you can upgrade to SB, they just cost too much to be good VFM at the moment.
 
I grabbed a Q9550 recently, and a decent OC'ing board to go with it. Reasoning being that something like a 2500k SB setup would cost me in the region of £300, whereas I could go for an OC'd Q9550 for about half that. My intention now is to run this into the ground, and replace it all in 18months/2 years.

Don't forget that surprisingly few games make good use of quads (although thankfully that is increasing all the time now), so depending on what you do with your PC, and if gaming, what games you play, you may see a drastic or a minimal increase with going to quad.
 
I upgraded from a stock Q6600 to a Q9650 clocked at 4.03Ghz.

I play BFBC2 with everything maxxed at 1920x1200 on a stock 5850 and I never get any issues whatsoever.

Was it a worthwhile upgrade?? Yes, definately.
Was it a cost effective upgrade?? Not quite so sure about that.
 
No idea how it'd benefit BC2 as I only got that after I'd upgraded but GTA4 improved massively going from a E5200 @ 4 ghz to a Q9450 @ 3.4ghz.
 
If you have a 775 motherboard that overclocks quads well (not all do), then getting a quad core Q9*** chip for no more than £100-120 is worth it definitely. Especially considering you can sell your old chip and recover at least half the money.

I have a Q9450 and it overclocked to 3.4Ghz on default voltage, using a 425 FSB. That has been fast enough for everything I do up until this day and I intend to keep the chip a long time so haven't overclocked further.

Also some console ports really like the extra CPU's - Capcom's MT Framework scales well with quads. GTA4 mentioned above. Since the consoles are to be around for quite a while longer, I think a Quad is the sweet spot now although dual is still viable.
 
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