I would tend to agree, the Q6600 I have running at the minute isn't doing very well with many games, to be fair it's running in conjunction with a 650Ti but dropping below 30fps on a game like CS:GO on minimum settings isn't really good enough.
CS:GO is pretty cpu limited as far as I'm aware, so no real surprise that it's struggling. You might find performance doesn't get any worse upping the settings actually, letting the GPU do a bit of work.
I agree with this. 2 and 3 gen top end i5 and i7 aren’t too hard to get hold of and are right up there with newer kit. But core 2 quad is borderline. However, in the case where graphics is also out of date I personally would do graphics first and worry about cpu/mobo/RAM later on when budget allows. GPU will be forward compatible and backward compatible and will make a noticeable difference. But good CPU and old GPU is still going to suck.
An upgrade for myself isn't too much of an issue, most likely i'll replace mobo and GPU at the same time now, it would have been nice to get some life out of these components as the mrs wants to play the odd game, I have been genuinely surprised by how much the C2Q struggles nowadays, but I guess it has been a good lot of years.
I've had another think about this but I think my original thoughts stand on the Q6600, for older games it will be fine but for anything from at least the last 5 years, realistically you'll need to upgrade. Sounds about right. GTA IV was pretty poor on the Q9650, maybe 30fps max with the GTX 660 TI and regular sub-25fps drops. When I got my Haswell mobo/cpu I initially kept the same Win7 install and GPU - fps problems went away, being limited iirc by the in-game frame rate limiter. Ultimately it comes down to how much you want to spend and what you want to use it for. Going with a pre-Skylake board will allow you to keep your DDR3 RAM but I'd expect you'll be changing again within 3-5 years. Buying new now should be good for 7+ for a gaming PC but you'll have to get some overpriced DDR4 instead, regardless of if you go AMD or Intel (both being perfectly viable choices right now). Choice is yours.
And they reckon DDR5 in that kind of time frame so actually maybe makes sense not to invest the money in DDR4.
Not really a problem, there won't be a reason to jump onto DDR5 right away as it won't offer any real performance benefits. Sure switching to something modern like for example an i3-8350k or a R5 2600 is a bit of an investment but either one eats a Q6600 for breakfast, comes with all mod cons and will last long enough to pass on all the early adopter issues of DDR5 / PCI-e 4.
An issue with a board from the Q6600 days is that you'll be missing a lot of decent features from modern boards - USB3.0, M.2 support, PCIE3, probably even SATA3, and a decent UEFI rather than an oldschool BIOS. Even if a C2Q wasn't limiting in of itself, the platform is lacking a lot of QoL features.
Until both Intel and AMD make a new chipset which takes only DDR5 and release a new CPU which only takes DDR5 and before you know it, *poof* DDR4 is now half the price/value. We'll probably have 8 - 12 core with 16 - 24 threads in i7 by that point as well by which time it'll be worth the upgrade.
When it comes to gaming we are already at a point where current high end cpus are worthless: http://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/amd-ryzen-5-2600-review,23.html Sure it may change 2 -3 years after the new console generation (currently rumoured for 2020) when games developed on new engines start to appear, but until then? Current mid range cpus will be just fine for gaming.
I finally managed to sell my Q67 based board for a princely sum of 10 GBP. There are bargains to be had if you dont need to overclock and steer clear of the bells and whistles boards. (Look for Q and B based chipsets.)
