Upgrading From A Core 2 Quad Q6600 To The i7-4770K

H

HardOCP News

[H] News
Joined
Dec 31, 1969
Messages
0
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that going from a Core 2 Quad Q6600 to a i7-4770K, is an upgrade that you will feel in the seat of your pants. ;)

We all love doing computer upgrades, but sometimes we have to ask ourselves if a full system upgrade is worth it or necessary. There are times that you may only gain a small percentage of a performance boost, where there are other times that you gain significant increases. Today I am going to compare my original Intel Kentsfield CPU and X38 motherboard to a shiny new Haswell CPU and Z87 motherboard.
Click to expand...
 
Not that big of a leap considering how much time has passed.

I mean a 2001 rig to a 2007 one would have been a colossal difference - PIII vs C2Q, whereas a 2007 rig to a 2013 machine is not nearly as big.
 
Six years to make facebook games faster.. just doesn't seem worth while to average joe. Head back one more gen and you would have something very comperable to the same change.

My inlaws are about to get an upgrade to an i5 based system. They just don't realize it quite yet.
 
My q6600 in my main rig is chugging along just fine!
 
Hell i7-920 @ 4.0 upgraded to 3770k @ 4.2 was a huge FPS increase in the ARMA2 engine. I remember my old Q6600, it was good but the next gen tech these days is awesome.
 
I upgraded my CPU's mostly due to encoding DVD's (at the time). My i7 920 was twice as fast as my Q6600, and my i7 3770 is twice as fast as my 920. And imagine the 4770k is a little faster (but not 2x).
 
I am going to still be rocking my Q6600 till 2014. That will be a satisfying upgrade.
 
What site is the article on? I can't open the hardocp page to get it its just a black page for me on IE7 :(
 
Sadly, most applications today don't take full advantage of a Q6600. Yea an i7 is a huge upgrade over a Q6600. How many multi-threaded applications exist today? How many games are capable of using all 4 of those cores? shockingly, not many. You're lucky if games can use dual core.
 
My i7 930 4.3GHz upgrade to i7 4770K 4.6GHz was a huge upgrade in FPS for me in GW2. Game is completely CPU limited and I was seeing cases of 30-40% more FPS.

Cases where I was getting 20fps before I'm now getting about 30 and when I was getting 40 I'm now geting about 60. It's pretty noticeable.
 
My kids are still using my old Q6600 G0 @ 3.6 Ghz with a Sapphire 4850x2 4GB pumping out the pixels.

Thing still purs like a kitten, though I had to replace the Abit IP35 Pro it was sitting in with a newer Gigabyte G41 to get rid of compatibility issues with W7.

They can play any new game, though AA and AF is limited with the older Radeon.
 
Went from a 2003 Athlon XP 2600+ (333MHz FSB), to an i7 920 in the end of 2008...Like night and day, especially when you later upgrade it to a SSD.
 
going from a 1ghz Thunderbird with Radeon 9800 to a 1055t with 460gtx 1gb sli back in 2010 was amazing.


Posted from Hardforum.com App for Android
 
Ah yeah I went from a - P1 - 133mHz -> PIII 866 Coppermine -> Phenom 9950 2.6gHz and it was warp speed each time.

Now-a-days there really isn't much bang.
 
That gave me a good laugh there. More like update your OS while you're at it.

Parja said:
Dafuq? Update your browser already!
Click to expand...


Still like a great video card, big monitor and a fast ssd upgrades. Those seems to return the best performance all around area for upgrades.
 
Q6600 at 2.8GHz still going strong on my end with a gtx460. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Money goes to other things.
 
I'm going to put my current Ivy rig into a backup PC when Haswell-E is released.
Usually I would upgrade it, but Ivy as a backup/gaming and Haswell-E (8-Core) for work, will be enough for a number of years from now.
 
I've never had a top-of-the-line system. However, my next upgrade, while cheap, will give me a boost over my old Pentium E2160, before I got married. The only thing upgraded since I moved to that setup (after a power supply crippled my DFI NF4 Ultra-D) was the video card.

The wife said we should try to keep at least one system fairly up to date. :D I can live with that.
 
my i7 860 is hanging on like a champ but video card wile it can max out nearly any thing at 1920x1200 (only thing it cant do is Uber sampling in Witcher 2 but even my friends Titan cant really handle that)

thinking about getting a 770 soon might wait till Witcher 3 comes along to see whats working well for it
 
450 said:
Not that big of a leap considering how much time has passed.

I mean a 2001 rig to a 2007 one would have been a colossal difference - PIII vs C2Q, whereas a 2007 rig to a 2013 machine is not nearly as big.
Click to expand...

That's a main reason I just don't have a need to upgrade my system. Even though I built it six years ago, it still works perfectly for all my needs. Unless you're gaming/encoding, most computers from that time will always be good enough for light work.
 
I went from a dual core E8400 to an i5-3570k. While the CPU boost was good - it was not comparable to the boosts I used to get in the late 90s, early 2000s. That said, the whole package upgrade was well worth it. GPU, SSD, RAM, etc. The combined effect of all the components was a welcome upgrade, and took games like Mech Warrior Online from barely playable to "yawn whatever" :)
 
With all this focus on lower power consumption over the past five years, interesting that peak and idle is so close between the systems.
 
I'm still very impressed with how the Q6600 and even Core 2 Duos in the 2.2+Ghz range hold up. Been buying refurbished PCs for $180-250 with W7 pro, socket 775 quad cores, and 4GB of memory to replace all of our XP machines at work. They are wonderful. Multitasking knowledge workers can't strain them. The only work load we see benefit on is Autocad, Virtualbox, and HyperV.
 
Celeron 300A @ 450Mhz --> Q6600 @ 3.6Ghz -----> 4570k @ 4.6Ghz
 
I think building a new computer from the ground up can have huge speed increases. Because you're not just upgrading the CPU.

System 1-
Q6600
500 GB 7200 HDD
4 GB DDR2 RAM
ATI x1900 512MB

System 2-
4770K
500 GB SSD
16 GB DDR3 RAM
ATI 7970 2 GB

Put all that together, and you get a much faster system. The CPU is just part of it. Clean install of Windows on an SSD with more RAM and newer video card? You'll definitely notice a huge difference.
 
450 said:
Not that big of a leap considering how much time has passed.

I mean a 2001 rig to a 2007 one would have been a colossal difference - PIII vs C2Q, whereas a 2007 rig to a 2013 machine is not nearly as big.
Click to expand...

I went from pentium3 to X58 nehalem, that was a satisfying upgrade, I think the gulftown hex I plopped in that will hold me for some time
 
Core 2 architecture is generally about my threshold in terms of telling a customer they should upgrade their computer vs. get a new one. Anything older and I generally tell them they should go new, though Athlon64 x2 or Pentium D can be ok in some cases if the usage is light enough.
 
I was all excited about Ivy Bridge, then it came out and didn't show the gains I was hoping for. Maybe the next intel chip upgrade will provide enough of a boost to make it worth it...
 
450 said:
Not that big of a leap considering how much time has passed.

I mean a 2001 rig to a 2007 one would have been a colossal difference - PIII vs C2Q, whereas a 2007 rig to a 2013 machine is not nearly as big.
Click to expand...
I beg to disagree, the onboard graphics performance is great IMO, eliminating the need for a separate graphics card entirely, and while the TDP isn't that much lower you have to remember that a lot of motherboard functions are now on the CPU.

I upgraded exactly from that setup, and for one it is absolutely insane how much faster it boots. And as mentioned, the total TDP of the system now that there is no video card and motherboard functions are on the CPU result in really low power draw and heat output especially since it completes operations so much faster.

Personally, I was very pleasantly surprised.
 
mavrocket said:
My kids are still using my old Q6600 G0 @ 3.6 Ghz with a Sapphire 4850x2 4GB pumping out the pixels.

Thing still purs like a kitten, though I had to replace the Abit IP35 Pro it was sitting in with a newer Gigabyte G41 to get rid of compatibility issues with W7.

They can play any new game, though AA and AF is limited with the older Radeon.
Click to expand...

What issues were you having with W7? I was using that same board under W7 and W8 x64 with no issues at all.

No way would I go back to my Q6600 at this point. Sadly, it still sits in my old case beside the new one. It was my longest standing CPU and gave me many years of service. By far the best bang for the buck I have ever had. I'm looking to stick it under water and put it in a smaller box for media and whatnot, as it will still work fine for things like that.
 
i went from a P3 @ 667 and a TNT2 Ultra, to an A64 3200+ and X800 pro.

that was just an insane upgrade for me. going from barely hitting 30fps in CS (about 5fps in smoke) to running farcry smoothly was just incredible.
 
Jeremy C said:
What issues were you having with W7? I was using that same board under W7 and W8 x64 with no issues at all.

No way would I go back to my Q6600 at this point. Sadly, it still sits in my old case beside the new one. It was my longest standing CPU and gave me many years of service. By far the best bang for the buck I have ever had. I'm looking to stick it under water and put it in a smaller box for media and whatnot, as it will still work fine for things like that.
Click to expand...

I still have my Abit IP35 Pro w/ q6600. It is now running as my WHS2011 box :). But there were issues with the board that were never fixed before abit went away. For me maxing the memory to a full 8GB of ram using 4x2GB chips gave memory problems even if there was no problems with the memory chips themselves. I tested each chip and each memory slot using mem86+ (it felt like it took forever) and everything checked fine so long as I only had 6GB installed, once I put in the 4th chip in any slot I got memory errors on the last bunch of tests.

The Virtualization Tech (VT-X) stuff in the bios wouldn't stay enabled unless you cold booted up the machine. From standby mode it wouldn't work, if you reset the machine, or even reset with the reset button it wouldn't come back even if you flip the settings in the bios. If I wanted to use Virtualbox I had to power down and sometimes turn off the power supply for it to be enabled.

But still none of those issues affected my W7 stability.
 
Finally read the article on my phone, seems about like I expected. I tried running a Q6600 machine next to my 3570k rig a little while back and it was frustratingly slow even with a SATA II SSD.

Parja said:
You could upgrade to IE8. It's still (mostly) supported, at least.
Click to expand...

No, I can't. All I can do is wait until they push the Windows 7 update at the end of the year. These computers are completely locked down.
 
Until AMD comes out with something revolutionary, I'm keeping my 1100T. Besides, My i7 960 is my daily driver.. I won't replace that for another 2 years.
 
wra18th said:
Until AMD comes out with something revolutionary, I'm keeping my 1100T. Besides, My i7 960 is my daily driver.. I won't replace that for another 2 years.
Click to expand...
I forgot to add that I went from a P4 on a 975 chipset to the i7 960/X58 combo and it blew it out of the water hands down.:D
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top