775 upgrade from e8400 to Q9550

[ducuiuc]

First off i dont have enough money to go to SandyBridge new build. Prolly not for a while. I know for shame.
But i was wondering if this upgrade would help me significantly.(at the right price of course)
I'm running an e8400 at 3.6ghz and can go to 4.0ghz also.
Would i gain much improvement if i went to a used q9550 with an over clock?
Also what would you think a fair price for a used potentially overclocked Q9950.
I intend to play games such as BF3 Black ops etc. I have a 6870 gpu on the way.
Dan

 

[mightymaxio]

for 300$ woah lol, might as well buy a cheap sandy bridge mobo and an i5 or something. 300$ is pretty overpriced for a socket 775 cpu, but then again they are obsolite so finding them is getting harder and harder which is why the price is so high.

 

[ducuiuc]

no im planning on getting a USED q9550. like should i max pay 150, 100 or wat
i know not to pay 300 for a q9550.

 

[megamanx00]

Depends on the game. If the program is properly threaded then you can see nearly %100 improvement at the same clock. Some games benefit little, or not at all, from having more than two cores. In many cases it will be less though as most games maybe do 40% better with 3 cores than 2 and another 10% or so with a 4th core. It really depends on the game and the best way to see it is if you google "CPU scaling" and add whatever game you are considering.

 

[megamanx00]

I should add that BF2 Bad company seems to scale well enough with more cores. Legion Hardware usually does alot of these interesting CPU scaling articles sometimes on a single card and others on crossfire and sli

http://www.legionhardware.com/articles_pages/battlefield_bad_company_2_tuning_guide,7.html

I do wish they would have overclocked the Phenom II 555 to 3.4GHz to match the clock speed of the 965 rather than leave it at it's 3.2Ghz default, but of course a mere 200MHz doesn't account for that performance difference ^_^. After all the quad core part is more than 50% faster there

 

[ducuiuc]

So how much should i offer this guy for a used Q9550 for it to be worth it.

 

[megamanx00]

Depends on you. I probably wouldn't go over $150 myself.

 

[ducuiuc]

Im planning on buying the used Q9550 for $120. So we'll see how that goes.

 

[megamanx00]

For $120, I'd say it's worth it if you already have a decent Motherboard and setup. A 50% improvement in the game you want to play is nothing to sneeze at. It won't give you an improvement across the board, but newer games that your dual core CPU might struggle with are more likely to be optimized for quad core CPUs. An overclocked Q9550 will probably last you a year or so which gives you time to save up for Ivy Bridge or the next iteration of Bulldozer ^_^

 

[shanky887614]

not worth it, considering that a socket 1155 motherboard 8gb ram,i5 2500 and case will only set you back around £300


parts are a lot cheaper in usa as well

 

[megamanx00]

Or, he could just spend $120 and basically have the same gaming experience.

 

[megamanx00]

Remember, he's getting a single 6870. For that an overclocked Q9550 is plenty

 

[ducuiuc]

yea mega my reasoning was that if i could get a cheap q9550 it would be SIMILIAR not equal to a fresh new sandybridge. If it lasts me two years that would be great i think id have an easier way moneywise to make the jump to SB. Im in college now so funds are a lil low. I hope to offset this up grade by selling one or two of my 4870s, and my e8400 on ebay.
So after the Q9550 install my rig would look liek this

q9550
6gb Ram
Sapphire 6870
1.5 tb memory and i have a 750 Watt 2year old corsair PSU
I really think this will last me til my late but eventual sandybridge upgrade 1-2 years from now.

I play Black Ops, BFBC2, Some console ports, and when it comes Battlefield 3.
With the purchase of the sapphire 6870 on newegg i got Dirt 3 and Deus Ex also.
So win

Id like to know ure guys' final thoughts.
I appreciate everything thanks.

 

[megamanx00]

Sounds good. If you have two 4870 1GB cards I think you should hang onto those a little longer to upgrade to the AMD 7xxx series as going to a single 6870 will prove a slight downgrade in some situations. If you have the 512mb cards then yeah a 6870 seems like more of an upgrade