Real life difference? Should I upgrade from Q6700 at 3gig to a Corei5 Quad

Lo people

My QX6700 (at 3gig) with 8 gig (yes I know...) of DDR2 800 could be upgraded, current budget allowing for a Corei5.

I'd need to buy more DDR3 ram, and a half decent Corei5/mobo combo.

So.... its for gaming.

Should I? With the original stuff sold for sensible dough.. it it worth it?

I wouldn't, to be honest. Not many games are that CPU hungry (Football Manager and Something: Total War spring to mind, but even then it's just a case of how long you're waiting for your next turn).

Compared to graphics cards, it's a lot of money for very little improvement. And replacing all of that RAM with DDR3 would cost a huge chunk of money for virtually no improvement.

I'm in a similar boat with my main desktop - fancy upgrading, but it's only for the hell of it really. I don't think performance would actually be impacted.

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Originally Posted by Zak33

Lo people

My QX6700 (at 3gig) with 8 gig (yes I know...) of DDR2 800 could be upgraded, current budget allowing for a Corei5.

I'd need to buy more DDR3 ram, and a half decent Corei5/mobo combo.

So.... its for gaming.

Should I? With the original stuff sold for sensible dough.. it it worth it?

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Nope.

No point at all.

It's rare that a game makes full use of 3 CPU cores, let alone 4 these days, no matter what the developers say. Better off spending the money on a graphics card, than on a CPU/mobo change.

Agree with the others, would be barely a sideways move - get a better GPU or an SSD with the money (unless you've already got one, of course).

id say keep your current stuff, if you really wanted to change then maybe an AMD setup is more beneficial?

Go for an AM2+ board, keep your ddr2 ram and pop in one of those new X6 chips. Cheaper than i5/7 build and would give you better performance i would think. But tbh id say wait, wait until bulldozer is out next year and what ever Intel have because bulldozer is meant to be good and i doubt intel are going to pull an Nvidia move and sit on their arses while AMD release it.

i5 is for upgraders from bad old dual cores imo, i7 is a real upgrade form a Q6700.

I went from AMD 3700+ to I5-750, Worlds apart.

Can't imagine that in day to day there would be much of a jump from your QX6700 though.

Well going from an e6600 @3.2ghz to and i5 @3.2ghz I can say there is a little difference, not is games so much but in general responce times it's that little bit quicker, but I'm not sure if that's down to 4core vs 2core or ddr2 via northbridge vs ddr3 direct to cpu.

Now would be a semi reasonable time to sell while 2nd hand ddr2 prices are still high and socket 775 quad is still seen as a decent chip (esp as you've got a top end extreme cpu)

Main thing going for i5 or i7 is sli or crossfire on one board, bad side the gpu's have got so good it's doubtfull you need to, unless you dip into a 3monitor setup or 3d.

i7 & x58 is probably a better bet if you want thoes high levels of memory again, not that they are needed for games, heck I'm still getting happly along with 2gb here. ;)

I wouldn't upgrade the CPU either, instead I would sell the GTX 275 that you've got and get maybe a ATI 5850 or 5870 graphics card.

Then I would probably save the rest of your money (and more) for either of the upcoming Sandybridge or Bulldozer architectures to have a proper upgrade!

Not worth it. Your machine should handle anything you throw at it. Just keep the cash down the back of the sofa and go fishing for it when the next generation technology matures a bit.

i have a Q6600 @ 3.0GHz and 4GB of RAM and I wouldn't upgrade so its deffo not worth it for you

Another vote for don't bother. Can't see the improvement - if you even see an improvement - being worth the cost and hassle. The only thing that might be in its favour is the high resale price you could get from your existing kit... but the fact that it's holding value so well might give you a clue as to how worthwhile an upgrade is ;)

Do what I'm doing, and watercool it to get a bigger overclock instead :D

When's this watercooling build getting done Jim? I want pictures :D

OK, here's another similar qustion for you guys: what about an upgrade from a Q9550 to a Q9650?

I don't want to overclock as my system runs very cool and quiet as it is. I would be reselling the Q9950 and it looks like I could get most of the cost of a Q9650 back. Are there any improvements in performance over and above the increase in frequency?

I do a fair bit of media encoding, so any increase in processing power should benefit me.

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Originally Posted by Funkstar

OK, here's another similar qustion for you guys: what about an upgrade from a Q9550 to a Q9650?

I don't want to overclock as my system runs very cool and quiet as it is. I would be reselling the Q9950 and it looks like I could get most of the cost of a Q9650 back. Are there any improvements in performance over and above the increase in frequency?

I do a fair bit of media encoding, so any increase in processing power should benefit me.

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The only difference between a Q9550 and a Q9650 is the frequency - 3.83 GHz-3.0GHz IIRC.
Not worth the bother IMHO. If it was worth the bother for the small percentage increase then replacing the whole MB/CPU/RAM for a 1366 based i7 system would be worth it. The i7's are a lot faster at media transcoding etc.