Help!! Old Hardware! HP machine and Q6700

munkie

January 22, 2010 10:45:11 AM

Dear tom's hardware readers... I have a Hp dx2400 I run win7 64bit.
4x2Gb DDR2 @ 400mhz.

being HP there is absolutely NO OVERCLOCKING option available save for BSEL mods

currently I am running an E7400 @ 10.5 x 333 with no VID mod, 100% stable no unreliability last four months. I am soon to come in posession of an HD 4870, with suitable psu! ( can only afford these goodies once they become yesterdays news :-( I will not be spending anymore until I can afford an i5/i7, except maybe.......

I was thinking maybe its about time I go from dual core to quad core...

a) am thinking about Q6700 but are they reliably able to BSEL mod to 1333fsb from 1066fsb (with VID mod to 1.4v if necessary)

b) considering my usage is very general: internet browsing/movies/music/office. and my gaming runs to titles like farcry2/crysis/f.e.a.r 2 I dont run any heavy applications which require lots of proccessing power. however i would like to run my games at 1920 x 1080 with highest possible settigns and AA.

having a radeon HD 4870 1Gb running the pretty stuff, if I can get a Q6700 reliably running 10 x 333 is it worth spending that £110 to go quad core. Will the additional two cores give me a noticeable improvement in performance?

for all the wisdom and help I am about to receive I thank you all toms hardware readers sincerely in advance :-)

More about : hardware machine q6700

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o1die

CPUs Master

January 22, 2010 10:51:13 AM

I bought a "pin modded" e4300 once, and it ran well at 1066 on an hp g31 board made by msi. But some boards don't even post with this pin mod using copper tape. If you're a novice, I don't recommend it. For general applications, the quad may not perform any faster. For video editing, you will notice a difference. But hp boards have no overclocking options in the bios, so I wouldn't do it. Your windows installation only works with hp motherboards; microsoft checks it when activating windows, so don't do any voltage mods on the board itself; they are sometimes expensive to replace, even used on ebay. And if you haven't backup up your windows installation using the built in program with vista or windows 7, buy some blank dvd's and burn a copy in case you need to reinstall windows.

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munkie

January 22, 2010 11:13:56 AM

WOW! that was quick :-) thanks loads o1die.

I forgot to mention that the E7400 is BSEL pin modded to be running 1333fsb as it is originally a 1066fsb component. So this motherboard has no problems with booting pin moddded CPU's, in fact prior to the E7400 it was happily running a BSEL modded E2160 from 9x 800 all the way up to 9 x 1333! and again stress testing proved it to be very stable.

You are right though there is no way I would mess with the the motherboard itself.

'video editing i will notice a difference' so for the types of games i play I wont notice much difference with two extra cores then? implying that £110 is too much for too little benefit?

Mind you this is all theoretical.. providing the Q6700's can run at 10 x 1333 (I cant crank up voltage in bios becasue it is HP but I have seen a 1.4v VID pin mod that should give me the extra juice if needed).

I wouldnt consider it if they couldnt because I am quite happy with the 3.49Ghz my E7400 runs at (pretty much the highest clock i can get because of multipliers on core 2's)
and i was thinkng if i could get double the number of cores running only marginally slower at 3.33Ghz (but with slightly more L2 cache) that literally doubles the processing power. so does anyone have any experience or heard of Q6700's being able to run 1333fsb without much voltage increases?

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