[upgrade] worth the upgrade?

If your playing a CPU intensive game you would benefit. I haven't read up on your game titles to know if that's the case or not.

Are you overclocking that Q6600? If not, you will definitely see a nice boot just by doing that. Using the same video card on the new setup wil still be bottlenecked by the GPU. If you haven't already, you will unlock any bottleneck the cp may be causing that GPU. You should be able to hit between 3.0~3.4ghz on that CPU.

The Q6600 is aging but is no slacker. Bump up the CPU frequency with an aftermarket CPU cooler like the coolermaster 520. It's cheap and cools extremely well.

If that doesn't make you happy enough then you still should wait for bulldozer to see what performance it brings to the table. The worst thing that could come from bulldozers release if it flops is it should create a new price shift on the CPU up end up buying.

That's my 2 clams on that one. =D

Thanks for the response! I've thought about overclocking but honestly I'm kinda embarrassed to say I don't really know what I'm doing when I'm in the bios... but I do have an after market cooler but just never got around to actually learning about overclocking. Would I be able to find the "CPU frequency" in the bios? and if I just bump that number up a little, that's all I would need to do? thanks again for you input.

Bump it up a little, you will likely top out around 333mhz without having to touch your voltages. Your CPU has a hidden potential of power you can only access by over clocking so roll up your sleeves and bump it up.

Don't do straight to 333mhz, go in smaller increments...

how will I know if I go to high? will I get a BSoD right away or something?

Also, if it locks up or crashes, shut down your system and pull the power plug and reset your CMOS on the mobo and start over.

I think overclock that Q6600 a little, I wouldnt upgrade mobo and ram yet. You have decent setup honestly.

Try overclocking. You should have a fair bit of room left in that system.

You should also check this out: http://www.gigabyte.com/support-downloads/cpu-support-p...

There's a seriously long list of CPUs that your motherboard supports. If overclocking doesn't work for you then consider simply replacing the CPU with a faster one from the list.

While it's true the I5 is faster and I think it's a great upgrade for those who have dual cores (or have 2 gigs expensive DDR2 RAM and need more)--I don't think that most people who already have decent quad cores with 4 gigs RAM+ have a compelling need to upgrade to an I5. You just want to get the platform that you have above 3 ghz, then you'll be golden for any contemporary games.

My only issue with suggesting to upgrade to a faster quad is there aren't many above the Q6600 & the ones that are faster are also very expensive on the 775 socket platform. You'd be better off upgrading the entire platform at that point.

Overclock and hold off upgrading for a bit longer. I would upgrade the video card before I upgraded anything else if you want do any upgrading at all...

I just overclocked my cpu to 300mhz everything seems fine and slight better  . For some reason I thought my 5870 was still pretty top of the line...feels like I just bought the thing. I guess I'll have to look into more gpu's soon. Thanks everyone for you help!

I stopped at 2.7ghz going to try that for a while then bump it up some more if I don't come across any heat issues or crashes.

As long as your aftermarket CPU cooler has properly applied thermal paste, it shouldn't be any issue to bump it up to at least 3.0ghz. I would continue until you at least reac that point so you begin to really see the benefit from overclocking from the stock 2.4ghz setting. That's where you minimally want to land wit that chip but I nearly positive you can go a little further as long ad your motherboard & ram permits.

^ +1

He would need a good CPU cooler to bump up to 400MHZ, a nocuta cpu cooler is a great choice. Lemonjelly and you don't need to cover the whole cpu of thermal paste just a dot the size of a pea because you want it to spread, so when you have to much you get airbubles and airbubbles are bad because it can fry your cpu due to the heat of the air in the bubble. (my own experieneces).

Best answer selected by lemonjelly.