LinkBack URL
About LinkBacksI have an E4300 @3.06 and its currently fine but more games are now taking advantage of 4 cores so wondering whether get a Q6600 now or wait until jan/feb for Q9450?
I have an E4300 @3.06 and its currently fine but more games are now taking advantage of 4 cores so wondering whether get a Q6600 now or wait until jan/feb for Q9450?
Well if you don't need or really want it this very minute I would wait. Prices on the whole tend to come down so in January you maybe to get a bargain price on something who knows!
The increase in cache sizes either way would help nicely for the latest games, on top of being quad core.
The Q6600 is available now, which means more fun sooner, however the Q9450 appears to be aimed to directly replace it, and intel have shown themselves not be afraid to undercut their older products.
Personally, I figure waiting isn't so bad, but the new processor now would help with the spate of games coming out this november.
It's a very personal decision and we'll all have different answers, but for me, the answer is right there in your question ....Originally Posted by rob4001
I cured myself of upgraditis years ago. Now, I overtly try to distinguish between when I want something (because it's available) and when I need something.
It seems to me, you don't need a Q6600. But you want one.
The question is, do you want one right now enough to either give up on the 9450 in 3 months, or are you prepared to take a hit by buying the 6600 now and upgrading in 3 months? Are you going to be wishing in 3 months that you'd waited? If so, given that you say yourself your current system is "fine", why not wait until it isn't? Why not wait until an upgrade will do something your current system either won't do or won't do adequately well?
On the other hand, if you want it because you want it, and don't want to wait .....
raverbaby (11-01-2008)
Good wise post, and agree.It's a very personal decision and we'll all have different answers, but for me, the answer is right there in your question ....
I cured myself of upgraditis years ago. Now, I overtly try to distinguish between when I want something (because it's available) and when I need something.
It seems to me, you don't need a Q6600. But you want one.
The question is, do you want one right now enough to either give up on the 9450 in 3 months, or are you prepared to take a hit by buying the 6600 now and upgrading in 3 months? Are you going to be wishing in 3 months that you'd waited? If so, given that you say yourself your current system is "fine", why not wait until it isn't? Why not wait until an upgrade will do something your current system either won't do or won't do adequately well?
On the other hand, if you want it because you want it, and don't want to wait .....
2nd computer gigabyte P965ds3p, 7770 E2140@2.9ghz, corsair HX520 6 years stable, replaced now with E8400@3.9ghz and will overclock more when I'm bored.
Just wait until the new one comes out.
Your E4300 is fine for now and unless doing serious multi-tasking, you wont notice the difference anywway.
I sias in a thread the other day, the first generation of Quads werent good value (particularly if you have a C2D already).
Look how the C2D prices fell when the likes of the 6750/6450 came out.
what is your system Saracen?
ontopic though I don't think anyone needs the q9450 yet, is the price difference from a q6600 worth considering the performance jump you get? wait for nehalem. your e4300 is fine, if you can stick with it till next may/july maybe the quads will drop in price again. or better still wait in december till amd releases a quad and the prices in a q6600 may drop to a price that is decent for a minor upgrade
You can play the waiting game forever, but really it comes down to whether your sytem still does everything you want right now. If it does, then why waste money.
But having said that i just upgraded from an AMD x2 4200 to a Q6600, just wanted to treat myself for my impending 30th, but probably really didn't need to at all. The way i see it though, my spare cash is going to decrease in the next few years having just got married, so might as well spend it on myself while i still can.
What games asctually make use of 4 cores, does anything currently make use of 4 cores?
Developers are only just coming round to the idea of utilising 2 cores let alone 4. It seems the CPU market is way of head of what's actually neccessary these days. This isn't a bad thing, it just means 1 decent upgrade will last a few good years.
what is your system Saracen?
I'm of the same philosophy as Saracen. I could afford the latest and greatest but I don't need it. Most chips/systems these days will run 95% of the stuff you use just fine with loads of apps open at the same time. If you're into applications that require more than a dual core then you would have bought one.
I'm going to upgrade my cpu next year sometime and I will have the "cheapish" overclockable 2core V "expensive" overclockable quad core gaming dilemma too.
Does anyone know of any benchmarks that show a quad significantly out doing a C2D in games?
"Reality is what it is, not what you want it to be." Frank Zappa. ----------- "The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." Huang Po.----------- "A drowsy line of wasted time bathes my open mind", - Ride.
i'll try and look for a benchy that shows that.
I've more or less cured myself of upgraditis too. I probably wouldn't be tempted by the Core Duo platform if I had 2GB of RAM - I do find myself needing more than that once in a while, but I can't justify paying for the currently more expensive DDR RAM on my 939 platform. But frankly, a 3.06Ghz Core Duo can easily ride out another 12 months in my opinion (till the next platform). From a gaming point of view, you are better off upgrading your GFX card (or throwing a second one). The QX9650 would probably make no difference on the Crysis / Unreal Engine 3 above at 1600x1200 on your PC.
Now if you want to do lots of encoding, or run some distributed computing project on the background or other CPU intensive tasks, then you may benefit from going Quad core, but even then I would definitely wait for the Q9### if only to get SSE4 (may be relevant for some apps) and low power consumption.
not forgetting hyper threading ;D
I think get an Q6600 worth every penny, I'm on a lowly Pentium 4 and i can't wait to get some money together upgrade my CPU and motherboard. Get a nice 3.2 GHZ overclock and this CPU will last you for a while.
Last edited by Blackmage; 30-10-2007 at 02:44 PM.
And the extra cache.. Or cash? Bottom line is, you'll get a little bit of performance for a little less power or cost, if you then decide to go Q6600. Either way, it makes more sense to me than to upgrade from what the OT has right now
Which one?what is your system Saracen?
I work mainly from home, and have done for a very long time. I have different machines doing different things. In total, there's currently eight PCs and a couple of laptops ..... unless I've missed anything out. But I'm taking on new work and a couple of those PCs need upgrading badly.
For instance, the system I'm currently typing this on is an old Tyan Thunder K7 server motherboard running a couple of Athlon 1200MPs, with 512MB of ECC RAM. It's reliable as hell, and for most general purposes, is perfectly adequate .... i.e. for web-browsing, office tasks (Excel, Word) and I even use it for DTP and PhotoShop. But the image sizes I'm working with in PhotoShop are going up and up, and it's getting to be a limitation.
So .... this machine is getting replaced. It's be a Q6600, three hard drives and probably 4GB of RAM, and an 8800GT. I already have an old Coolermaster 101 ally case sitting in another office not being used, so everything is going in that.
But I also have an old P3-550 server driving a large RAID array. So, I'll rebuild the RAID system into the Dual MP1200 case (a HUGE full tower server), and re-use the MP1200s, motherboard, RAM, etc.
So arguably, albeit indirectly, I'm upgrading a dual processor P3-550 into a Core Quad.
How's that for a large step?
My current laptop is an elderly NEC Athlon XP1800. I increased the RAM from 256MB to 768MB, and I could go further, but there's no need. I keep looking at modern laptops and thinking "should I?" ..... but them common sense sinks in when I think about what that would allow me to do that I can't do now. The answer is .... nothing at all that I want to do.
I won't chase specifications .... or not with computers, anyway. Cameras .... well, maybe.
My rationale, each time I look at an upgrade, is ....
- do I need it?
- what will it do for me?
- what will it cost?
If the benefit justifies the cost, I'll do it. If it doesn't, I don't. And for quite a long time, nothing (beyond an extra HD or two and a RAM upgrade or two), justifies the cost.
Bear in mind though, I'm not much of a game player. Or not these days, anyway. Been there, done that. Don't get time these days, and after spending a good part of the working day on computers, I'm not that keen to spend all my leisure time on games. Besides which, FAR too many modern (by which I mean the last 10 years) seem to be more about fancy graphics than game play, and all too often, the game play has been abysmal. So I have the occasional gaming session and want to be able to play a decent game if the mood catches me, but it isn't a priority. If it had been, I'd probably have upgraded a lot more systems a lot more frequently. But my last full-price game purchase was Quake 3 .... though I did grab a bargain-bin copy of Myst 3 the other day.
So I'm NOT suggesting that my upgrade strategy would suit other people, especially not heavy gamers. But the philosophy would .... compare cost to the benefit and upgrade when you need the upgrade, and not just because there's a new keep-up-with-the-Jones' gizmo available. We will, of course, all have very different views on what we 'need', and why.
There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote
