Small upgrade. Going to make a difference ?

Currently have a Q6600 with 3GB of DDR2800.

Have the option to upgrade to an AMD645 X4 3.1GHz Quad with 4GB of DDR3 1333mhz.

Just wanted to know if it's likely to make any difference ? Going to be using it for gaming.

Cheers.

No difference at all. The amd quad is a Propus core with no level 3 cache.

Are You are running your current ram as 2 sets of matched ram? otherwise your losing performance there as it will be running single channel instead of dual channel.

Is the q6600 overclocked? If not overclcok it and that will help loads.

Spend the money upgrading the 8600gt to a GTX460 1 gig or a HD 6870 1 gig and that will make heaps more dfferance to your gaming

All stock. Only running 3 1GB sticks, as the 4th socket is faulty. Should have returned it, but never got round to it.

Just been googling on how to OC it. It's running on a P5NE-Sli board. Seems pretty simple.

Only asked as my GF needs an upgrade for uni, and could have swapped my rig for her new one. But the mobo I would have gotten would have been a deal breaker anyway.

Planning a large i7 build for myself early next year, so will just have to hold on till then :P.

Just get the Q6600 over 3 gig and that can make a huge difference as 3 gig seems to be a magic point for games and fps. Just make sure you have adequate cooling as they can be heat monsters when overclocked.

It's had a huge-ass heatsink on it since I bought the thing. As it was running insanely hot on the stock. Something stupid like 60C idle. Might have been higher. Runs pretty cool now. Its in an Antec 900 so lots of fans. :P.

I'll have a play and see what I can do. Cheers.

Have you read this guide??

http://forums.hexus.net/pc-hardware/...beginners.html

Antec 900 is a good case with nice airflow :)

Yeah, I have seen that at some stage. Had a partial attempt at doing it a little while back. Will give everything a read up and find out the best / easiest way to do it. :P

It's nice. Noise isn't an issue for me, so it's perfect. :P

3GHz shouldn't be any trouble at all for a Q6600, had mine running at 3.3GHz for about 2 years now and it's as stable as a rock.

Don't rush it and take your time to get all the OC settings spot on and you shouldn't need to ever touch it again, until you come to upgrade.

The Q6600 was made fore oc'ing (esp. the G0 stepping). had mine upto 3.6Ghz, though I dialed it back to 3.4 for day to day running. Go for it, modern cpus are really hard to screw up, if something goes wrong just reset the bios and start again, small steps are the way to go.

Q6600 is what my friend has been running for ages now. He recently overclocked it and it saved him from buying a new mobo and sandy bridge cpu.