E4300 Upgrade

I've been thinking about upgrading my beloved E4300 (1.8Ghz to 3.2Ghz :) ) for a while now but I still can't decide if there's a really good value for money upgrade path.

I've noticed that you can get the old (non S) Q8200 for a touch over £100 now but I don't know whether going from a 3.2Ghz dual core to a 2.3Ghz quad will show a real performance boost...

It's primarily a gaming PC and although most still don't, there do seem to be significantly more games making use of multiple cores now.

Anyone got any thoughts?

i recently upgraded from e6600 @ 3.2 to a q9250 @ 2.3 and i went back to the e6600 i found the quad slower believe it or not and would not clock very well either

I wouldn't have thought it would make much difference, if anything it may be slower in some circumstances, unless you overclock the Quad too..... I'm still not convinced of the need for quads though, even though they've been around for years, if you do intensive encoding then yes, but other than that....? Probably better to save and go LGA1156 when they are released, as hopefully a mobo/CPU/RAM combo will be much cheaper than it was for the early i7 adopters. :)

Some improvement, but not much, also depends on how high you can get that q8200 clocked too

Really good going on getting that e4300 to 3.2ghz btw :bowdown:
I cannot get my e6600 stable past 3.2ghz atm, issues with v-droop.

EDIT: and make sure your motherboard can use the newer 45nm chips before you get a q8200

You've basically confirmed what I've been thinking, it's probably not worth it even for £100.

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Originally Posted by Pob255

Really good going on getting that e4300 to 3.2ghz btw :bowdown:

EDIT: and make sure your motherboard can use the newer 45nm chips before you get a q8200

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It can with the latest bios revisions, and the my TRUE helped with the OC :D

I'll stick with my monster overclocked E4300 until it dies or i5 becomes good value :p

I went from an E4500 at 2.95ghz to a Q6600 at 2.91ghz and IMHO there was definitely a speed boost in games and many apps. This is primarily due to the huge increase in the size of the cache per core in the Q6600.

I would look at a secondhand Q6600 if you can get one for around £80.I got mine for under £80 and sold my E4500 for a decent price. The cost of the upgrade was less than £40 IIRC.

A Q6600 at the same speed as your current CPU would troll it twice over backwards, 3 times over if you get a newer Yorkfield i should think :)