Q9650 vs Q9550

[Greenbandit]

I am considering buying a new CPU and the two that I have in mind are Q9650 (3.0GHz) & Q9550 (2.83GHz). Currently there is a big price difference between them, so when I look at the graph on
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html that shows the Q9550 as slightly fater than the Q9650 it makes me wonder if the extra cash for the Q9650 is worth it.

I have seem similar screwy benchmarks before. Two years ago I was still running one PC on an AMD Athlon 3000+ and another on an Athlon 3200+, BOINC consistently benchmarked the slow one as being slightly faster and I never did find the reason.

Any one got ideas about Q9650 vs Q9550 performance?

(if you don't know about BOINC, do look it up - it is a good wasy to help others)
http://boinc.berkeley.edu/
http://www.boincsynergy.com/images/stats/comb-3317.jpg

[moogle]

There's no difference, except the multiplier and the price. Q9650 is 9x multi while Q9550 is 8.5x.
They're the same core just priced so far apart so the lower one sells more. It's just like the Q6600 and Q6700, same Kentsfield core just different multis and speeds. The Q6600 could overclock to Q6700 speeds and more so for the £200+ price difference at the time (back when the Q6600 dropped from £400 to reasonable prices, Jul 07 iirc) it wasn't worth it. That result is probably an anomalous one as the Q9650 beats the Q9550 stock in others.

Q9650 isn't worth it though, if you're overclocking get a Q9550 and oc it, otherwise get the Q9650 if you got the money and need the extra performance.

[Greenbandit]

That result is probably an anomalous one as the Q9650 beats the Q9550 stock in others.

Cheers.

That was my guess, so I think I'll have to wait a bit before upgrading. I've already got instability issues on my Vista64 system without having done any overclocking (& SP1 has once again failed to go on and has bogged up the system), so at the moment I'm not going to start any overclocking.
For now I'll wait for the price of the Q9650 to drop.