I'm finally upgrading my good old E4300 that I had overclocked from 1.8 to 2.8 Ghz.
I have an ASUS P5B Deluxe, yeah i know its old but i cant afford to change it at the moment, and I'm thinking on upgrading to one of the following Core 2 Duo.
E7200 (266 x 9.5 - Rev. M0)
E7500 (266 x 11 - Rev. R0)
E8400 (333 x 9.0 - Rev C0)
or the Core 2 Quad
E8400 (333 x 8 - Rev M0)
Thats why I can afford and I have available, and I'd only buy the E8400 (duo or quad) only if it really worth it since the price difference is high compared to the others.
The rest of my system is
4gb of RAM 800Mhz (4-4-4) Kingston
BFG Geforce 7800 GTX (which I plan to switch for a Radeon 4870 soon)
I use the computer for a lot of things (movies, music, internet, word processing, very casual graphics design), but I want it to work fast on games mainly, since I really dont mind waiting a couple of extra minutes for it to finish enconding videos or anything like that.
I plan to use it for as long as I can... I know I still have room for more upgrades (RAM, CPU and VGA) so I dont plan on switching the whole thing yet .
Cant afford to buy a new mobo, ddr3 ram and cpu all at the same time. So I have to replace them one by one as I sell my used stuff.
If You want ot keep as long as possible go for quad processor. So you are looking at Q6xxx, Q8xxx or Q9xxx processors. Depends how much you want to spend. Q9550 would be good choice followed by Q9400, then Q8400. I would probably not look at Q8300 and Q8200 as their low multiplier will limit overclocks. Another option is to get used Q6600 which would be about the same level as Q8400
Yes. I updated it already while I still have my e4300.
Now... I appreciate the help, but If I wrote those models, its because I can only pay those at the moment.
The Q9x's in my country go over $300 us dollars. And at the moment at most I can squeeze $220 from my pocket, which is enough for that Q8200.
So, I'm interested in going for something that i can overclock well (like the e4300) so that if i need a little extra speed I can just do that, instead of paying a lot that I cant really overclock a lot. And when I say overclock I mean the to the % diference between the max speed and the stock speed, and not only the max speed that i reach.
Also, I rather save some $$$ for a good VGA rather than spending it on a faster CPU.
Nevertheless I appreciate the help and the time you guys take to answer my quesion.
I agree ... get an E5200 or 5300 and overclock the crap out of it - easy to get to 3.5Ghz or so on stock air ...
I have one (E5200) of those. Fun chip to tinker with. Another advantage is that with the relatively low bus speed, you will not need premium memory and it will leave more money to allocate to the GPU.
Over in the Overclocking|CPU forum, there's a lot of threads about the E5200
Isnt the E5300 a 4300 with a higher multiplier? or is there something that I'm missing? I dont find it on the Core 2 Duo processor finder from the official intel webpage.
If you were to choose any of E7x's that I posted which one would you go for?