keep q9650 for AAA games or upgrade?

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jaspergrass88

Commendable
Jun 17, 2016
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So currently I'm running a dell 545 with a stock mother board with a core 2 quad q9650, a evga 750ti, the downside is I just found out the MOBO can only support 8gb of memory in DDR2. Now Ive read the q9650 is a decent processor, comparable to the early i3s, if not better. #1: is this true?
#2: would it be worth it to keep this processor and invest in the Asus - P5QL/EPU ATX LGA775 Motherboard which I found on ebay for 50, which supports 16gb. DO I even need to do this to run newer AAA games or will 8gb RAM and a newer GPU be all I need?
 
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BFG-9000
While a highly clocked Q9650 at ~4GHz+ is indeed as fast as a Sandy or Ivy Bridge i3 for most applications, those applications heavily dependent on memory bandwidth will run much slower. The most commonly used applications in this category include data compression and games. So despite having much the same cores as the later Nehalem, such a system would be far from ideal for new AAA games unless your monitor has a very low resolution such as 856x480.

Surprisingly, despite using slow DDR2 over a FSB to a motherboard mounted memory controller, latency measures no worse than DDR4 on Ryzen, and the large 12MB cache further helps to hide this weakness. It's the lack of bandwidth that's the issue for games.

As mentioned, 4GB DDR2...
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BFG-9000

BFG-9000

Splendid
Sep 17, 2016
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While a highly clocked Q9650 at ~4GHz+ is indeed as fast as a Sandy or Ivy Bridge i3 for most applications, those applications heavily dependent on memory bandwidth will run much slower. The most commonly used applications in this category include data compression and games. So despite having much the same cores as the later Nehalem, such a system would be far from ideal for new AAA games unless your monitor has a very low resolution such as 856x480.

Surprisingly, despite using slow DDR2 over a FSB to a motherboard mounted memory controller, latency measures no worse than DDR4 on Ryzen, and the large 12MB cache further helps to hide this weakness. It's the lack of bandwidth that's the issue for games.

As mentioned, 4GB DDR2 sticks are ridiculously expensive, although 2GB sticks are just ~$12ea so 8GB can be reasonable if you have a 4-slot motherboard.

BTW I would not recommend any DDR3 motherboard for socket 775 now as those accept only half as much RAM as equivalent same-chipset DDR2 boards, and require extremely low density 2Gbit chips which are all but impossible to find nowadays.
 
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