Have read Clunk's excellent guide to O/C C2D's, and...

[scaryjim]

*the temps were all with the side on btw.

Good stuff - that's a very nice temp drop and you should definitely be able to up the voltage and push the CPU a bit further now. Welcome to the wonderful world of overclocking

[The Fish]

I'm indebted to your good self and the other guys who contributed their knowledge. Really appreciated, and more importantly, acted on.

So, case, psu then s775 quad core. Then how long before I get an itch for that core i5 upgrade. Common sense says my frame rate will drop a fair bit when I go to Win 7 with Dx11, so I reckon it will be just after that. And then the graphics card. Never ending isn't it? Oh well, music is a bit like that too lol.

[scaryjim]

... Common sense says my frame rate will drop a fair bit when I go to Win 7 with Dx11 ...

you won't be going DX11 with a 9800GT Your games will automatically fall back to DX10 or DX9 mode. In fact, there are still very few games that use DX11 at all.

tbh, if you're going to get a new PSU, case and a Q6600 / Q6700, and you put a bit of an overclock through the Q6x00, I don't reckon you'll be looking for an upgrade until Sandy Bridge and Bulldozer come out over the next 12 - 18 months, which means that when you do upgrade it will probably be to something better than an i5 750. I'm currently gaming on a Q6600 @ stock frequencies with an 8800GTX, so a similar age / spec to where you'll be once you've bought that quad. I mostly play RPGs, and I'm getting smooth framerates at 1600x1200 with all the pretty turned on

[The Fish]

Hmmm. I take your point about similar cards. I play TW2008, was a big Ghost Recon man back in the day, now its Operation Flash Point DR, and HAWX.
On a 1920 res, I can see that happening with my current card. Have been looking at a 5770 or maybe a 5850. I doubt I will Sli ever, not that this mobo will anyway. But I knew that when I bought it. I game but not like I used to with 9ManSquad lol. Wasn't aware Win 7 will push the DX back until its comfy. Did Vista? Never touched it.

I do like to stay one step behind the bleeding edge as that way I don't spend too much on upgrading. The spare tokens have to be split with the music equipment, loads of hardware in spite of a pc based system. I run SONAR PRO 7 and Reason 4. I'm intending to go 64 bit on Win 7, having checked all my plug ins will work, as I believe it will virtualise a 32 bit system.

I am looking forward to getting a quad as I know some of the games I use will like that, ie OPFR. And I will enjoy the extra processor power in SONAR for sure. Once thats in then I will go to Win 7. Probably Jan as I will recase and psu first.

On your point about clocking the new quad core, as the 45mm quads run about 7 to 8 multipliers before the 6Mb cache jobs kick in, and they run at 1333FSb, is there much room to clock? I reckon boards like mine, as you pick up on the web, as I now have, don't like to clock much.

[scaryjim]

On your point about clocking the new quad core, as the 45mm quads run about 7 to 8 multipliers before the 6Mb cache jobs kick in, and they run at 1333FSb, is there much room to clock?

I believe you'll be able to get a bit out of them, although you're right, if you're going to run a 45nm quad (didn't realise your board could support them, but it does ) like a Q8400 / Q9400 then you are going to be slightly hampered by the already high FSB and low mutliplier. But your motherboard should be able to coax a bit of extra performance out of them - I'd be surprised if you didn't manage to get one up to around 3GHz. If you don't mind a second hand upgrade, though, you could hunt out a Q6600 from ebay or some other appropriate place which runs a 1066 fsb and would give you a bit more head room. That said, the Q6600 only runs a 9x multi, so it's not going to make *that* much difference...

[The Fish]

Looking at Toms Hardware charts for intel cpu, it seems clock speed does matter still, even on multi threaded apps with quads. Obviously the app makes a big difference.

Does the extra cache make a big difference?

[scaryjim]

Does the extra cache make a big difference?

I'd've thought with a quad it would make more difference than with a dual core - the point being that you've got 4 cores shifting data over the FSB rather than 2, so you're going to have more competition for FSB bandwidth in the event of cache misses. The Core 2 are very well architected to avoid cache misses, but obviously the more cache you've got the less likely you are to have a cache miss Getting the best out of a quad core is all about how fast you can feed it with the data. You'll particularly notice the cache if you do a lot of multitasking - I assume because it's harder for the prefetchers to predict what data will be needed so you get more cache misses. I think cache makes a reasonable difference in gaming too. I haven't got time to read this myself (hometime already ) but have a look at the QX9650 vs QX6850 comparison in this hexus review - as you can see from the table the main difference is the 45nm vs 65nm and 12MB cache vs 8MB cache: they run at the same clock speed (3GHz) and FSB (1333MHz) so it'll give you a good overvie of the differences larger cache and the 45nm architecture tweaks make.

[The Fish]

Cheers Jim, I'll look at it.