E6600 to Q9550 - worth it?

Would an upgrade from an E6600 to a Q9550 be worth it?

I have no [current] intention of buying into Core i5/i7 as that's a whole new board, new RAM, etc (plus I intend on getting my paws on an Intel SSD to put Win 7 on in October)... but I'm liking the look (for the price) of the Q9550 for £170ish (£210ish with a bigger, better cooler).

I presume it'd be a more useful upgrade than, say, an E8500. I can get my E6600 to E8500 speeds quite simply but I'm not happy with running it 24/7 as the temps are somewhat high. Granted the ambient is high but it's still hot.

Any opinions gratefully received.

i went from a E6550 to a quad 9550 and tbh it makes a big differnce if you do multiple things at once i.e extracting archives, watching tv, playing games at the same time :P

but thats what i would expect from a quad jobbie, these must be really cheap now considering quite a few people are going towards the I' range. keep your eye out on the FS threads on tech forums!

I do tend to have a load of stuff open at any one time (typically Photoshop plus Lightroom, IE8, etc) - might well give it a whirl, then.

Ta.

I wouldnt see any need in getting one unless you're going to be doing intense processing jobs like rendering/archiving/gaming at the same time.

Just seems like you could save it for a future build or some games =]

About the most stressful thing I can think I've done on a fairly regular basis is do some batch RAW conversion whilst uncompressing a few archives - and getting bored with waiting so firing up Age of Empires II.

I went from an E6600 to a Q6700 and I saw a benefit - but then the game I use my PC for is optimised for a quad core. In day to day usage it makes no difference at all.

I recently went from an overclocked E4300 (at 2.66GHz for 24/7, I like to keep the power and noise low) to a Q6600 at 3.0 GHz (just upped the FSB to 333, no other changes needed, and speedstep is still on so it keeps my power usage and noise low).

Well worth it for me, I use Virtualbox a lot for XP and Linux, it's noticeably snappier with the hardware extensions, multitasking is better and Supreme Commander seems to be coping better when there are a lot of units in action.

I bought the Q6600 (eBay - £90) rather than a whole new system as I already had a perfectly decent motherboard, RAM etc... i5 isn't that much faster I thought it was worth it and i7 is out of my price league at the moment, when USB3 hits I might wholesale upgrade to get the new cool stuff, but to honest I'd see more benefit now by upgrading my 9600GT rather than going i5 (waiting to see where prices go after the next gen cards appear) or buying an SSD, so I probably won't for a year or so... plus I need a bigger case and PSU for new graphics cards to work (Antec Solo doesn't have the room for many high end cards) so I have plenty to spend my money on.

Went from E6750 to Q9550 - not because I particularly wanted to, more because my E6750 decided to end its miserable life rather prematurely :/

Can't say it's really made *all* that much difference, main times I've noticed it is in PCSX2 (PS2 Emulator that's very much dependent on CPU speed) and video encoding.

Having said that, we're talking about upgrading from an E6600. I don't think upgrading to another dual core Intel would be a worthwhile move, and neither do I think that i5/i7 offers any *amazing* upgrade in speed over a good quality C2Quad, so if you're wanting to upgrade then a Q9550 would be an excellent choice.

Cheers guys.

All info duly taken on board and much appreciated... and a Q9550 is on it's way from the good people in Bolton! :)

I convinced myself the buy-in cost to i5/i7 is just too great for the rewards (I'm not really a massive game player and I don't think there's sufficient difference between a Q9550 and i5/i7 for what I'll use it for to justify the cost) when I have other upgrades in mind which will probably make more difference, like an SSD for instance. Not to mention the many other avenues my money disappears down every month! :)