Hi I'm looking to upgrade my rig which is very old, I went to the darkside (xbox 360, xbone) and ain't done much with it in a while it's current specs are: Core 2 Duo - E8400 OC@3.5ghz 4GB DDR2 800Mhz ram Asus atx motherboard cant remember the exact board HD 4650 1GB DDR2 GPU I have hdds, dvd drives and a be quiet 500w psu Yes very old I've done some googling and know intel's cpus are ahead of amd's cpus in terms of IPC / singles threaded performance and amd's apu's integrated gpu have the edge over intel's integrated gpu. Know the real question, I'm looking to play current games on medium settings at 720p upwards I have a budget of £200 for the cpu, ram and motherboard and would like better performance than my current rig all round, is it possible on this budget
FM2+ looks to be ideal for your requirements. You can easily pick up the APU, RAM and mobo for your budget.
If you are only looking to play games at medium settings at fairly low resolutions you could just pick up a 2nd hand Q6600 and newer GPU, like a 670 or 7950. Would come in at well under budget and prob be faster than anything new.
Would a Q6600 bottleneck current GPU's such as a R9 270X or R9 290 as i plan to upgrade the gpu at a later date thanks for the replys
At that resolution prob not. At say 1080 yes. 290 is a far faster card than a 270X so would be more likely to show bottle necking. If it was me and you couldn't do the lot all at once I would get the GPU and the Q6600 then upgrade the CPU/Motherboard as needed. If you overhaul the CPU/Mobo now the 4650 is going to suck the life out of any benefit.
Thanks for the advice , last quick question would a apu say a A8 kaveri show any real improvement over a q6600
I think clock for clock the Q6600 would be equal to the FM2 stuff, but obviously the FM2 runs at higher clock speeds. Someone correct me if I am wrong. Don't get me wrong I am not banging the drum for keeping a Q6600 forever but it might allow you to stagger your upgrade while getting nice performance boosts from where you are now.
FM2 is closer to the Q9xxx possibly slightly better as the phenom ii 955 was also very close to the Q9xxx. FX6300 or FX8320E would be better than FM2 IMO. After that I would look to i5
Well that's funny, I was reading this hoping for some advice on what to upgrade my Q6600 to! Been out of hardware for a while (stopped CPC sub ) - all CPUs seem really expensive at the moment/these days?! Is an i3 4160 (the 3.6GHz version) a reasonable upgrade? I read new stuff's around the corner, is it a bad time to buy? And how do Intel/AMD stack up these days for low-mid end gaming? Using a 6870, mainly BF4.
Don't underestimate the old Wolfdale chips! If I were you I'd be tempted to get some cheap second hand 1333MHZ DDR2 RAM and overclock the E8400 to 4GHZ. Then get a high performance second hand graphics card. That should be very capable at a 720P resolution so why spend more! Upgrade your operating system to Windows 7 on an SSD and you're laughing! This all depends how capable your motherboard is of course.
Depends on Power Supply to if you do a heavy overclock and a hight draw gpu the system might get unstable ?
I would say get something with newer tech. I remember playing Borderlands with a Q6600 not so long ago and it was absolutely awful... many modern games benefit from the CPU grunt of a newer system. The Q9xxx CPUs are so overpriced (compared to more recent hardware like socket 1156 and socket 1366) I just don't think it's worth putting that kind of money into it now... £50-60 for a used Q9550? Not to mention you'd have to OC it to get anywhere near what more modern hardware can achieve.
If you download CPU-Z you can find out what motherboard you have without opening up the system. Then it will be possible to determine what CPUs it supports. That will help determine if you will be best upgrading the GPU now and the rest of the system later.
Is there such a thing? I thought DDR2 topped out at 1066MHz... In any case, the cost of DDR2 (particularly for larger capacity DIMMs and higher clock speeds) is pretty brutal these days - it's more expensive than DDR3! Even in the Marketplace here, 2x2GB 800MHz DDR2 is going for somewhere in the region of £25, and 1066MHz kits are £30+ Personally, I think that s775 kit is pretty capable (and indeed I'm still running an E8500), but there comes a point at which you're throwing money away trying to upgrade gear that can only do so much. I think at some point you have to make a clean break and move to a more recent platform that offers greater scope for future upgradability - so something like a cheap s1150 mobo with a Pentium or i3 (or the AMD alternative of your choice), and some DDR3 will knock the granny out of an old s775 set up.
It is, but not for modern games. Incidentally I just bagged a 775 kit (mobo, cpu, ram, hdd) off ebay for £30 to use as a backup system. At some point, for the hell of it, I'm going to throw in my GTX770 and see what games a Core2 system can run.
Oh, indeed, it'll toil to run a lot of modern stuff, which is why there comes a point at which you have to cut your losses and move to a more modern platfrom. I've not quite reached that stage yet (mainly because I don't have enough time to game anymore) but I were planning to upgrade my PC, I'd be ditching the s775 platform and going s1150 even if that meant a little more outlay.
In saying that, it was actually Adobe Bridge that felt particularly sluggish when I was running a Q6600. Certain desktop software makes good use of both physical and logical CPU cores, and that's what you'd really notice by moving to modern hardware (if you use such programs). I'm spoiled rotten with 12 CPU cores. When I was rendering a video in Premier Pro the other day, CPU usage was at 75%. Just imagine how long that render would have taken with a Core 2 Duo.
The Witcher 2 was the first game that absolutely crippled my E8400 at launch, with a GTX580 and 4GB. I don't know how much a Wolfdale quad might have helped, because I replaced it with a 2500K on a P67 with 8GB and it made the game sing
I thought Shadows of Mordor might be the end of the line for my E8500/660ti/4GB DDR2 combination, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that it ran like a charm at 1200p. OK, so it wasn't super-smooth, but it was perfectly playable and enjoyable on decently high settings. I'm at the stage where I refuse to spend any more money upgrading my s775 kit, so when the day comes that the rig doesn't cut the mustard any more, it'll be consigned to the great ATX case in the sky and I'll spend some serious money on much faster gear - probably an i5/Z97 MITx combo with 8GB of DDR3. Would much rather do that then shell out for a better s775 CPU or additional DDR2 RAM that will give a slight improvement in performance for a relatively high outlay.
