CPU upgrade advice

I would suggest a Q9550 but QX9770 would be faster

Hey pparks, I was thinking the same thing. I was looking at the prices and values of 775 CPUS and I thought to myself, why waste the money on such a little upgrade? I might as well get a new mobo and look at better processors, right? I'm almost kind of hesitant to O/C because first I know nothing about it and second I'm scared to fry this damn thing. Lol.

pparks1 said:

I have a Q9550 with a slight overclock and it's great. However, this CPU is running $275 at NewEgg right now....so I hesitate to say upgrading the CPU is a wise move since you are already on a quad core.

Generally speaking, I find that sockets just change far too rapidly anymore to consider upgrading a CPU. It's often a matter of replacing the mobo, cpu and RAM when you are ready to change.

That's not exactly accurate.

I mean, LGA 775's been around since what... '06?, and It wasn't until '08 that Intel came up with a new socket, LGA 1366, that's a good ~2 year differential right there, pretty reasonable if you asked me, and Sandy Bridge won't come out until '11, so that makes it another ~2 years (LGA 1366 came out late '08, November IIRC) between LGA 1366 and LGA 1155.

yowanvista said:

I would suggest a Q9550 but QX9770 would be faster

Not by much.

Extreme editions are only worth buying if they have larger caches or something to that effect, but in this case, Q9550 has the same amount of L2 cache as the Q9650 or QX9770 (12MB).

I'd go for a Q9550 here.

pparks1 said:

SlackerITGuy said:

pparks1 said:

I have a Q9550 with a slight overclock and it's great. However, this CPU is running $275 at NewEgg right now....so I hesitate to say upgrading the CPU is a wise move since you are already on a quad core.

Generally speaking, I find that sockets just change far too rapidly anymore to consider upgrading a CPU. It's often a matter of replacing the mobo, cpu and RAM when you are ready to change.

That's not exactly accurate.

I mean, LGA 775 has been around since what... '06?, and It wasn't until '08 that Intel came up with a new socket, LGA 1366, that's a good ~2 years differential right there, pretty reasonable if you asked me, and Sandy Bridge won't come out until '11, so that makes it another ~2 years (LGA 1366 came out late '08, November IIRC) between LGA 1366 and LGA 1155.

The point is that the jump from a Q8200 to a Q9550 isn't that much....but really covers the lifespan of the 775 socket. So, while you can technically get a faster CPU which fits that existing socket, the performance attained is going to be far less than the current gen CPU's...and this upgrade may in fact cost you more than the current gen CPU as well.

I'd much rather spend the money to upgrade to something like a Core i5-760...which is a $205 CPU...but of course, that requires an LGA 1156 mobo...and new RAM.

There you go.

That's why the first question I asked him was, 'how much are you willing to spend?', maybe a whole platform upgrade was within his budget.

And I disagree with you here, a Q9550 would make a significant difference over a Q8200 performance wise, you gotta remember, a Q8200 is as low as it gets in the quad core department, a Q9550 has 3 times the cache and ~500MHz increase.

Can my mobo handle the Q9550?

pparks1 said:

SlackerITGuy said:

And I disagree with you here, a Q9550 would make a significant difference over a Q8200 performance wise, you gotta remember, a Q8200 is as low as it gets in the quad core department, a Q9550 has 3 times the cache and ~500MHz increase.

Will there be a difference...certainly. Will it be worth $275??? That's an altogether different question. If it were me, spending close to $300...I'd want a huge kick in the pants. It would be hard to spend $275 on a CPU...knowing that a $205 CPU on a different socket would be a huge bump yet again in performance.

Probably not. But the difference would be VERY noticeable.

Look, I agree with you on the whole idea that a complete platform upgrade (either to LGA 1156 or LGA 1366) would net him the best possible performance increase right now. But until the OP comes out and says, 'look I have this much to spend $xxx', we can't do anything about it other than suggest him better CPU's for his current platform.

pparks1 said:

As far as a 500Mhz performance increase.....not really sure how big of a difference that would make. I overclocked my Q9550 from 2.8Ghz to 3.2ghz...so i picked up about 400Mhz....but cannot really say that overclocking by that amount made a tangible performance increase in anything other than benchmarks.

The ~500MHz increase is secondary, the 3 times the L2 cache (4MB vs 12MB), that's where the real difference is.