Hello! Currently, I'm running a lowly Q6700 at stock speed and cooling. Some what good at games, and works nicely for juggling applications, but that's just the four cores. From what I understand, I could downgrade to a Q6600 and overclock it, or buy an E8400/E8500 and leave it where it is.
Now, I could do that or upgrade my video card, which happens to be a 9800 GT, with the motherboard Intel G33. Yeah, I was surprised when I heard of it too - and it only came with one PCI-E slot - x16.
I'm in a bit of a bind right now, so I can only upgrade one side, the video card or CPU. I did want to use Nvidia's SLi feature, but that of course requires two PCI-E 2 slots, which I don't have. What I could do is pick up a motherboard that support PCI-E 2.0 for a slight boost of performance.
As you could of guessed, I'm not an enthusiast, but I would like to achieve as much in a price range of 250, but I can bump that up to 300. Should I change the CPU, Video card, or video card + motherboard for PCI-E 2.0 support?
Thanks in advance for informative replies.
Shorthand information:
Intel G33
Q6700
9800 GT
6 gigs of RAM
Air cooling (I'm cheap tot he point of just setting up a household fan to slow directly on the exposed components of the computer.)
What would be the point of "downgrading" to a Q6600 when you have the Q6700? The only reason I can see is if you wanted to get a G0 stepping model which might give you *slightly* higher overclocks.
Also the 9800GT is still a great video card and can run 95% of the games out right now at high settings.
The best upgrade I think for $250-300 would be to get the arctic freezer 7 pro cooler for $30, overclock the Q6700 to 3.0 - 3.2GHz and buy a GTX 275/ Radeon 4890 video card for $220-250.
Can you also give us the specs of your powersupply?
Message edited by ehanger on 07-05-2009 at 05:58:45 AM
------------------------------Intel core i7 920 @ 3.5GHz
ASUS P6T
Corsair 3GB DDR3-1333
(2x) EVGA GTX 275 SLI
Reply to ehanger
Yeah shubham is right that 500w coolermaster isn't going to be enough to power a GTX 275. Since the 9800GT is still a viable card for todays games maybe just upgrade the CPU cooler and get a 750-850W powersupply and wait another 6 months for the DX11 cards to come out then get a Radeon 5870/GTX 300 card?
Well, I suppose I could dwap out the motherboard to take advantage of the PCI-E 2.0 technology. From what I'm reading, the Intel G33 is terrible for overclocking CPUs. Does anyone know of a motherboard ont he market that can replace the G33 so I can OC the 6700? Quality and the same size would be nice.