Ok I'm probeing the idea of an upgrade. I'm a student, so money is obv tight. Are Q6600's (Overclocked) still cutting it these days for Gaming (BC2 atm + Upcoming BF3) Rest of my rig would be staying the same. (4gb RAM/1gb 5770) Cant really afford to upgrade to a new Mobo and i5 unfortunately but wondering if its worth it atall.
They will "cut" it, but its really far behind the gaming standard now. Yes its a quad core, but don't let that fool you. The architecture and clock speeds are really very far behind what you can buy at a reasonable cost.
It would do a fine job. However it may be worth waiting 2 weeks for AMD's next gen set of CPU's. Bindi hinted in this thread that its going to be very reasonably priced so you may be able to get a modern quad core. http://forums.bit-tech.net/showthread.php?t=209911
I would say your rig is fine and if you wanted to upgrade then an appreciable leap could be had through swapping that 5770 for something more substantial be it in the AMD or Nvidia camp.
Depends on the game. In Battlefield Bad Company 2 for example it is a superb cpu due to the game being very very well threaded. However in games which only use a couple of cores your going to find it lacking a little. Id say you will be fine.
Try to remember one important point when it comes to gaming. Frames per second come from the video card. I have a 6970 overclocked with a Q6600 running at 2.8ghz. It used to run at 3.2 ghz, then it became unstable, dropped it to 3.0 until that became unstable. Every time I had to slow it down, windows took longer to load, and games took longer to start. but they still play just fine. So if you are finding that games are too demanding to run at a fast FPS, upgrade the video card. Good luck with school!
Well i might be able to get a Q6600 from a friend but if it falls through ill set a budget and probably wait 2 weeks for AMD to play their cards.
There new architecture may be able to. Also why are card such as the 5770 so populer when 580 is better? Price. AMD offers some great bang for buck.
Well defended against the short sighted reply from Phazed there. I am not a fanboy of either processor but attitudes like that aren't helping anyone. You are right to wait and see how the prices shift around before making your move. Personally I'd go for a cheap but more modern architecture and just OC it to bits.
Thing AMD might be able to do is bring a chip that you can clock and perform for under K series prices. That could be a real deal clincher. Roll on next few weeks.
You are going to drop the Q6600 into your sig build to replace the E6400? Could be negligable gains for games, since you are already overclocked, probably a different story if you are using other heavily multithreaded apps. I have a Q6700 but looking at some of the spec lists for the big upcoming releases it may be starting to look a little tired. If the price is close to a donoation its probably worth it and it depends on how much you have to spend on an upgrade. If you can only afford a cpu maybe hold off until you have put asside a larger budget, if you can afford to upgrade the cpu, mobo and RAM to the newer standards then why not just do that?
Q6600 are stable proven chips that are ample for gaming puposes yes, budget vs technology what you save on the cpu spend on a fair GPU
Just upgraded from GO stepping Q6600 @ 3.0Ghz, Gigabyte P45 UD3, 4Gb OCZ Reaper DDR2 1066Mhz, HD4870 1Gb................to............i5 2500K, MSI P67A GD65, 4Gb G. Skill Ripjaws DDR3 1600Mhz, HD6950(shader mod & overclock). I game @ 1920x1200 on BFBC2. I used to have all medium settings, 2x AA & 2x AF..... Large explosions up close dropped frame rates down to 16 -22 fps, otherwise very playable. Now all settings are maxed, 8x AA & 8xAF....smooth as glass. Hope this helps.
Coming from an i5 750 owner, there isn't a game out there that can use it to it's full potential so I'd expect that a Q6600 would still be more than ample if you have a decent enough video card. Plus i hear they have a fair amount of overclocking headroom with a decent cooler. I'd say E_Spaghetti's performance gains came mostly from the GPU upgrade. I'm not saying the CPU doesn't help but with a card like that it would be hard not to have smooth framerates in games that were released before it was. Like Mrbungle said, it's weak point will probably be single threaded games, but these were most likely released in this chip's heyday, most games released now are much more multi-threaded.
