LGA 775 upgrade

[oushi]

I'm looking to upgrade my CPU and am looking for some advice.

My current system is running:
E2160 (OCed to 3.0 GHz)
Gigabyte P35-DS3L
2GB DDR2 800
GeForce 8800GT OCed

Since the system still doesn't feel sluggish to me except in newer games, I'm staying with the 775 socket to stretch my dollar. I'm interested in either replacing the processor with a Q9550 or an E8500 and use the money saved to increase the ram to 4GB.

Any recommendations?

 

[warmon6]

I'm looking to upgrade my CPU and am looking for some advice.

My current system is running:
E2160 (OCed to 3.0 GHz)
Gigabyte P35-DS3L
2GB DDR2 800
GeForce 8800GT OCed

Since the system still doesn't feel sluggish to me except in newer games, I'm staying with the 775 socket to stretch my dollar. I'm interested in either replacing the processor with a Q9550 or an E8500 and use the money saved to increase the ram to 4GB.

Any recommendations?

Well i would recommend going to Q9550 between the 2. No point going from fast dual core to a slightly faster dual core as it wouldn't offer much gain. even thought E8500 as 6x the cache. i doubt you would notice a difference from you're overclock.

 

[shening]

Q9550 all the way. E8500 is a waste

 

[chriscornell]

I was in your situation not so long ago and decided on the Q9550. A stepup in socket, cpu and therefore also DDR3 ram was too expensive - so I decided to go for the quad core and 8Gb of memory, so my system could keep up with i5 i7 systems. So far I've been really happy with my choice.

I was at a LAN party last weekend, and my system owned most of the i5 machines there, and almost kept up with the two i7 DDR3 systems present at the LAN.

More and more games are written to use multicore cpu's - if you look at BFBC2 for example, it really thrives on triple- or quadcore setups.

Well that's my opinion

Btw - if you decide to go with the Q9550 then your graphics card will bottleneck the system.

 

[LePhuronn]

You'd probably get more of a boost from a newer graphics card.

 

[oushi]

The quad it is. I know my graphics card is getting old, but it still holds up fairly well at mid settings for my resolution. I'll replace it later down the line when games start becoming completely unplayable. Thanks for all the feedback!

 

[oushi]

Best answer selected by oushi.