Gaming Impact: Q9550 vs 2500k

Spending the 200 bucks or so just wouldn't make sense today when a 2500k can be had for the same price.Even if you do have too swap your motherboard.

A good p67 board can be had for under a hundred bucks now.
 
RamonGTP said:
So first you wanted to upgrade now, then considered waiting for IB, then wait for Windows 8, then wait for Haswell? You do realize something will come after haswell and you'll probably want to wait for that too right?
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Yeah I know, when I made the OP I thought we were much closer to the release date of Windows 8, so Ivy Bridge would make sense.

RamonGTP said:
Makes no sense to wait for an OS unless you're buying a retail computer and dont know how to install an OS. Otherwise you can always install it after it comes out.
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I have Windows 7 OEM, which I don't think you can transfer on to a new computer. That's my reason for waiting until Windows 8, which will be released in October, from what I've heard. Now, if the time comes around and I hear of jaw-dropping performance gain between Ivy Bridge and Haswell, I'll hold off. If the difference is small, I won't worry about it. The main thing, is I want to be Thunderbolt ready.
 
I'm on a 6870 and i went up from a q9400 @ 3.2 to a stock 2500k and i went from constant 90 fps in league of legends to around 130 and almost the same in NBA 2k12
 
I'm in the same boat as the OP when it comes to trying to upgrade my S775, but in the end it'd be a complete waste of money to spend another dollar on this socket unless you find the deal of a century (Q9550 under $100, imo).

Unless you plan on using your S775 as a secondary machine, you are not saving yourself any money in the long run by upgrading twice: once now, and again when the Q9550 and the rest of your old system can't hang anymore. Besides, your resolution is so pitiful that you'd do better off to spend money upgrading your display, as that will carry over to whatever computer you use. To be honest, even the CHEAPEST MOTHERBOARD and CHEAPEST i3 >>>>>>>>> any more wasted money on S775, and this is coming from someone who has been milking his S775 for 6 years, dude.

Oh, and why haven't I upgraded from S775 yet? I replaced my girlfriend's computer last year instead of my own, because hers died and was even older than my S775. She now has a 2500K + ATI 6850, both of which smoke my E6600 + ATI 5770 easily. But to be honest, the newest game I play is TF2 (at 1080p with all maxed but no AA), and the rest of my time spent is downloading and uploading a bunch of crap from Usenet and BitTorrent. I'm an IT, so I admit that the computer is showing its age when I multitask heavily (and I sure do wish I could uncompress big archives or encode things quicker), but from what I've read so far Ivy Bridge doesn't seem like a huge step up from Sandy Bridge; I may just wait until 2013 and Ivy Bridge's successor before I make my next upgrade. The main reason I would upgrade sooner than Ivy Bridge is if I come upon a SATA 3 SSD or a Revodrive for dirt cheap, neither of which my S775 motherboard supports :mad:
 
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Like I said you really only have a few options. sell your stuff and buy a cheap AM3+ x3/x4 combo or an 1155 i3 combo (shouldn't cost much out of pocket when done, ebay it or sumthing).

Or just bite the bullet and get a 2500k/2600k/2700k, and if you have alot of money go for an Intel 6 core.

Low = X3/X4 or i3, medium, 25/26/2700k, high = 2011 Intel 6 core.

Or like you said, just sit around forever is a much cooler plan. :)
 
I was on an E8400 overclocked to 3.8ghz and the performance jump to going to a 2600k for games amazed me. I didn't realize how big of an improvement it was going to be. The biggest difference was with BF3 which I had assumed was mostly GPU limited. Boy was a wrong. I gained more then twice the FPS by going from the E8400 -> 2600k. Granted, the Q9550 has two more cores but clock per clock each core isn't much faster then an E8400 was.

Now is definatly the time to upgrade if you are still on LGA-775 IMO.
 
I think the best option would be to stick with what you have for the next year and then build a new sytem next year with Haswell. I just can't see putting any money at all into a 775 system. The only way would be, and I have no idea how much they go for, but if you got a q6600 or q6700 for like $75 or less. Even then you would be looking at building new for Haswell anyway.

I can't see much sense in upgrading for gaming right now, not until the next gen consoles come out. When they do come out everybody will probably need a 6-core for gaming. My q9950 has no problems with any game. Sure I could probably get double the frame rate in games but personally I can't tell the difference between the 60fps I am currently getting in many games compared to the 100fps I would be getting with a Sandy Bridge setup. I am an offline single player gamer so the frame rate isn't all that important to me as long as it's smooth and playable.
 
I think you will find over and over and over again that there is not much of a point going past a 2500k for gaming.
 
JOSHSKORN said:
Given these two processors, obviously the 2500k is much better than the Q9550. Realistically, in the aforementioned games list, is there a noticeable performance difference when using the two different processors?
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i think you answered your own question with "obviously the 2500k is much better than the q9550." all things remaining equal (or as equal as they can be when comparing 1 year old hardware to 3+ year old hardware) in a system running a gtx460 at 1600x1200 res you would notice a considerable increase in performance.

when i upgraded from my q8200 to a 2500k i was able to increase the settings from high to fully maxed in bf3 and i was still getting a higher framerate than i was before. im using a gtx460 1gb (763mhz) and i play at 1680x1050.
 
News has come out that Ivy Bridge CPUs won't be delayed and will still launch in April.
 
JOSHSKORN said:
Yeah I know, when I made the OP I thought we were much closer to the release date of Windows 8, so Ivy Bridge would make sense.


I have Windows 7 OEM, which I don't think you can transfer on to a new computer. That's my reason for waiting until Windows 8, which will be released in October, from what I've heard. Now, if the time comes around and I hear of jaw-dropping performance gain between Ivy Bridge and Haswell, I'll hold off. If the difference is small, I won't worry about it. The main thing, is I want to be Thunderbolt ready.
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You say your motherboard is failing, right? The OEM license allows for a license transfer when dealing with a motherboard failure.
 
Q9550 at 3.6 with SLI GTX 580s or the new 7990s would work

wait for sandy


i sold all my stuff on ebay and running a i5 2500k at 4.8..
Its ok and does improve games alot but those games listed are all GPU
 
JOSHSKORN said:
I've only seen a Q9550 for around $300 on eBay, slightly less than the Core i7 2600k. The Core i5 2500k was, last I checked, about $215, a difference of $100.

My monitor, specifically is the Samsung SyncMaster 213T. It's an LCD monitor.

I may just upgrade when Windows 8 is released, and all bugs have been fixed. That is, driver issues and software issues, including browsers, mainly. I'll still use my monitor until it dies off completely. I was also leaning toward Ivy Bridge, anyway. I think it will support Thunderbolt. I'll keep my video card for now, because from what I understand, even the new AMD 7000 series video cards, the new PCI-e 3.0 interface shows no sign of improvement over using the same video card in a PCI-e 2.0 slot.

I didn't know that the GTX 460 was superior to the GTX 460 SE. It still was an upgrade from what I had (GTS 8800 320 Mb), and that's how I looked at it. It was one of the cheaper cards, and does what I needed it to do. Again, I don't have the monitor to show the difference between regular and extreme or ultra graphics settings.
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The Samsung SyncMaster 213T was a great monitor - for its day. The only quibble is that its day was before the bottom fell out of the FP display market (and prices summarily plummeted).

Thunderbolt support - that is limited to specific Z77-chipset motherboards (so far, only certain Gigabyte Z77 motherboards have even hinted at supporting it). Further, unless you have devices supporting Thunderbolt *already* that have drivers for Windows (either 7 or 8), it's not worth considering. There is also the reality that there are plenty of Z68 motherboards that support Ivy Bridge *and* PCI-E 3.0 that are available today (and in every price range and both ATX and mATX).

Windows 8 Consumer Preview - I've been running it as sole OS since the weekend after it became publicly available. When BridgeWalker is finished, it will, in fact, remain sole operating system - I won't be reinstalling 7, except in VMs.

As to why 7 got kicked ti the curb, it's simple - the Consumer Preview supports all my hardware (so much for hardware issues - including drivers), it supports my applications and games (in the case of the games, they run at least as well as, if not better than, under Windows 7), and, unlike all the detractors, the lack of a Start menu is such a non-issue.
 
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