E8500 up grade to q9950??

hi all! i am thinking uf upgradeing me cpu from an e8500 duo to a q9950 quad. do you all think this would be a good choice?

i am planing to overclock it as well.

also, would i have to reinstall windows vi*cough*crap*cough*sta? dont realy want to but will if needed. thanks!

(oh and for the gamers, will it affect my gaming experience, in otherwords, give me more frames that the duo?)

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^ Thats the kind of "upgrade" youll see.

Pretty much.

I 2nd the motion, stick with your current CPU. It's easier to overclock than the C2Q.

I disagree 100%, especially since we don't know why he needs to upgrade. Besides, I'm a firm beliver that in two years or less, quads for gaming will be a requirement.

Stick with the cpu you have and overclock it to 4ghz. Upgrade to a quad when you NEED a quad.
I have no use for a quad myself.

By the time Quads become a REQUIREMENT for games, socket 775 and even i7 will be long gone.

Trust me.

Unless your professional life requires a Quad (rendering, etc), keep your E8500 and be happy playing any game you want.

^^ Fanboys, gotta love them

nightsilencer actually made a point i didn't think to bring up; Quads will start to have price jumps within the next few years, and given how the best quad (Q9650) is only around $125 more then the best Duo (E8600), and more mainstream quads (Q9550/Q9450) are even more competitive, it makes little sense to go with a duo at this point, knowing you'll probably upgrade within a year or two anyway.

yes for now, but the Quad-core gaming revolution has already begun, and quantum processing units won't come into play for a good few years.

Why? because once they hit consumers the application developers still need to work on programs for the architecture so it may take 1 or 2 years after consumer quantum that it becomes mainstream, but more likely Graphene will take over from silicon and he won't have to worry as much though the requirements may become much higher.

Sounds like heroofspirits got his answer, unfortunately it was the wrong one.

If anyone else comes across this thread, please be advised that it's a total crap festival.

neon neophyte wrote: "I've just smoked a butt load of weed and can tell you a 4ghz dualcore will game WAY better than a 3ghz quadcore"

For starters, when comparing any two contemporary cpu's the first thing you should look at isn't
the clock speed but rather the BUS speed. In this case both are 1333 mhz so they have about the same bottleneck when they send info to your system's ram. Next you want to compare the L2 cache size. The e8500 has half the cache (6mb) of a q9550 which leads to an ENORMOUS disparity in performance. This is because the L2 cache is used as a workaround for the bus speed. A higher L2 means a higher bottleneck.
Even if you factor in Amdahl's law and the whopping 0.3 ghz difference on the clock, you're still much better off with a Yorkfield q9xxx. (Although at 95w tdp you need some pretty impressive cooling for overclocking the quads).

In short the e8500, while a good cpu, is in fact inferior to the q9550 especially when it comes to gaming.