How good would a core2quad be for gaming?

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Red Squirrel

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My current server is a core2quad. It maxes out at 8GB of ram, and I want to do more stuff with VMs. My new machine is a Core i7 with motherboard that can support way more ram, think like 32GB, vs 8GB on the server. I have 12GB right now. Thinking of making my new workstation my server, and making the old server my workstation. I run Linux, so speed is not an issue, because it's going to be fast anyway in terms of GUI speed and opening stuff. Also have a SSD. What I'm wondering is, will I take a huge hit in terms of gaming? I don't play super high end games at the moment. Mostly Minecraft, UT3, and the odd Indie game. I don't have any specific newer games in mind, but idealy I'd like to be able to play any other modern game that is out right now if I decide to.

Think I'll be fine if I do this swap? The video card I use now would be put in this older machine (pretty sure I have the slot for it).

I can't see why not, myself, but just thought I'd check. Ultimate goal is to get a rackmount case for the current workstation and put it in the server room as the server, keep the old server there but run the appropriate cables upstairs. Ultra quiet and cool office. :p
 
Core 2 Quads (if you're talking about the 45nm Yorkfield 12MB ones) are roughly comparable to Phenom II processors: not great but serviceable. Don't expect to max out anything in the GTX 500/Radeon 5000 series GPUs with such a CPU. Modern i5/i7 CPUs are much better for gaming.
 
I have a Core 2 Quad Q6600 myself. I'm too backlogged on console games to do much PC gaming, but I do know it's plenty powerful for the specific games you mentioned, including UT3. (I played a little bit of it when it first came out with my Q6600/8800GTS setup.)

I'm not as sure about modern games, since I don't have a personal point of reference more demanding than UT3, but here's Anandtech comparison including Far Cry 2, Fallout 3, and Crysis Warhead:
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/53?vs=287
Unfortunately those are all five-year-old games. This article from four years ago should give some general insights about how CPU's of the time were scaling:
www.hardocp.com/article/2009/05/19/real_world_gameplay_cpu_scaling

Overall, you probably won't be getting luxurious framerates in modern games, but I'd expect most to be playable at least...most. ;)
 
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Going from a Core 2 Quad to say a Sandy Bridge, Ivy, Haswell would be a significant difference, lets put it that way.
 
when I first built my current pc i got everything but my gpu and even with my old gpu i got 10-15 fps more in modern games i went from an e5200 at 3.3 to what i have now stock with a 4800
 
Depends a bit on what video card will be used, but, as mentioned Core2quad is similar to Phenom II x4. I just read an article last week comparing those two at the same clocks, and the Phenom was a little faster in the benches.

One of those around 3ghz with a 7850 or 660 would be plenty for 1080p gaming. The quad would be slower than newer CPUs for certain newer games that still only use two cores, but I wouldn't worry much about it. A Core2quad at a decent ghz is still a solid CPU.

And if you don't like the quad for games for some reason, sell it and get something else, I guess.
 
Good to know, think I'll give this a go. Worse case scenario if I build a proper server I can use the i7 machine again.
 
Mini-Me said:
I have a Core 2 Quad Q6600 myself. I'm too backlogged on console games to do much PC gaming, but I do know it's plenty powerful for the specific games you mentioned, including UT3. (I played a little bit of it when it first came out with my Q6600/8800GTS setup.)...
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I have the Q6700 with an 8800GTS and i've played skyrim but max payne 3 wouldn't work, and by wouldn't work... i got probably one frame/sec.
 
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bmatic said:
I have the Q6700 with an 8800GTS and i've played skyrim but max payne 3 wouldn't work, and by wouldn't work... i got probably one frame/sec.
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WOW. Does Max Payne 3 rely on SSE3/SSE4 or VAX instructions by default and provide a sadistically slow fallback codepath or something? Or is it really just that CPU-intensive?
 
Mini-Me said:
WOW. Does Max Payne 3 rely on SSE3/SSE4 or VAX instructions by default and provide a sadistically slow fallback codepath or something? Or is it really just that CPU-intensive?
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It's pretty hard on CPU and GPU.
 
Mini-Me said:
WOW. Does Max Payne 3 rely on SSE3/SSE4 or VAX instructions by default and provide a sadistically slow fallback codepath or something? Or is it really just that CPU-intensive?
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i am not sure, but it would start out playing and it would be fine... but when i got to the mission where you are hanging off the helicopter... it was awful... i kid you not... i fps... so I though it was the video card, so i upgraded to a gtx670, but still got the same result.

The thing is that the CPU didn't even seem like it was being utilized 100%, but i do think it was the CPU.
 
Went from a q9550, to a 920, to an i5 2400

Some games have higher frame rates but overall it wasn't a big difference between the 3 at all, had the 9550 at 3.6 also. Really only upgraded because of microcenter allowing me to upgrade for free pretty much from how much I could sell the old ones for.

I've used a 460 (now a 650 ti) on all 3 also.
 
bmatic said:
I have the Q6700 with an 8800GTS and i've played skyrim but max payne 3 wouldn't work, and by wouldn't work... i got probably one frame/sec.
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Thats more due to the GPU than the CPU, it's not very applicable here. A q6700 can power MP3, I've seen it run on my q6600 without problem.

A C2Q is alright for gaming. I've been going along perfectly fine on a q9400, and also have a q6600 right now, both work fine for any gaming I have done. The only game I've played that could have used a better CPU was All Points Bulletin when it was first released - it benefitted greatly from an OC, but not so much for APB:Reloaded now... I dont feel restrained by my CPU at all.

I'm also not overly picky on FPS, so while you'll get a higher FPS with a new CPU, you should still be well within playable FPS just by dropping the CPU as long as the rest is mostly the same..

OP, it sounds like you would have no issues swapping to a C2Q for your needs. Give it a try, you can always swap the machines back if you really dont like the performance.
 
Depends on the game. Even back with BF:BC2, there was a quantifiable FPS increase going from a Q6600 (oc'ed to 3.4) to a 2600k (oc'ed to 4.7). Yes, I know the OC's make it less apples to apples, but still.
 
OGOC said:
Depends a bit on what video card will be used, but, as mentioned Core2quad is similar to Phenom II x4. I just read an article last week comparing those two at the same clocks, and the Phenom was a little faster in the benches.

One of those around 3ghz with a 7850 or 660 would be plenty for 1080p gaming. The quad would be slower than newer CPUs for certain newer games that still only use two cores, but I wouldn't worry much about it. A Core2quad at a decent ghz is still a solid CPU.

And if you don't like the quad for games for some reason, sell it and get something else, I guess.
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I have to dispute that - way too much empirical data to agree with it.

My current Q6600 (still pushing it) is utterly stock; worse, it's shackled to the CSM (corporate-stable/consumer-stable) chipset that is Intel G41. My current GPU is an nVidia GeForce GTX 550 Ti - also utterly stock. Yet so far I haven been able to play every game I own at 1920x1080 either all-out or nearly all-out. (Included in the mix is Crysis 2 Maximum and Crysis 3 and both SC2 games - the latter two absolutely firewalled.) No SSD; therefore, that's not a factor. I have 4GB of utterly vanilla DDR2 system RAM. (9-9-9-24 CL9) I haven't had to back away from 1920x1080 in any game I have. Therefore, I have to think that if a stock Q6600 isn't a bottleneck, an overclocked Q-series CPU certainly isn't a bottleneck. And the Q6600 has been EOL how many years?

Look at Yorkfield - socketmate to Q6600. It has both more on-die cache and a faster stock clocking than Kentsfield; therefore, if Kentsfield is not a bottleneck, even stock, how much of a bottleneck would its faster-clocked and greater-cache socketmate be - stock or overclocked?

Something else is wrong if any Intel quad-core is a bottleneck in anything other than a CoD or Battlefield game - so far, nothing is showing that Q6600 - even stock - is a bottleneck in anything else.

You almost certainly WILL see frame-rate increases with future CPU upgrades - I'm not implying otherwise. However, by removing bottlenecks elsewhere (especially the GPU) you can actually get more mileage and years out of your CPU - and it's especially the case if both CPU and GPU are dead-stock. Just because you CAN push your CPU or GPU harder doesn't necessarily mean you have to - especially if the improvement in doing so is at the point of diminishing returns.
 
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PGHammer said:
I have to dispute that - way too much empirical data to agree with it.
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Which part are you disputing? Looks like you agree with what I said. Actually, you make the case even better by saying the Q6600 at stock is fine other than for a couple games at their highest settings.
 
My overclocked Q6600 bottlenecks the shit out of my 7870 in nearly everything. It works fine, but the GPU is not going to be stretching it's legs fully without a better CPU.
 
Mr. Bluntman said:
Core 2 Quads (if you're talking about the 45nm Yorkfield 12MB ones) are roughly comparable to Phenom II processors: not great but serviceable. Don't expect to max out anything in the GTX 500/Radeon 5000 series GPUs with such a CPU. Modern i5/i7 CPUs are much better for gaming.
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For what it is worth, I got about a 50% performance jump with a stock AMD 965 going from a 560ti 2GB to a GTX670 PE OC in BF3. Other games saw great gains, others not too much. My point being that the CPU and the Phenom IIs should get you by with most games at 1080.

Obviously, the newer i5/i7s will give you a bigger performance jump. In games I can tell my AMD 965 is a bit limiting as certain areas (lots of units on screen, larger maps) cause performance hits.
 
OGOC said:
Which part are you disputing? Looks like you agree with what I said. Actually, you make the case even better by saying the Q6600 at stock is fine other than for a couple games at their highest settings.
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And look at the games that I didn't put on the table - the most recent games in the Battlefield and CoD series. Both have optimizations for more recent CPUs than Q66xx; given that, I'm far from surprised that Yorkfield, let alone Kentsfield, perform relatively poorly in comparison. (The same is, naturally, true in comparing Intel multi-core vs. AMD multi-core.) Such optimizations aren't the rule, but the exception when it comes to PC gaming - even for PC exclusives.

Lastly, look at the block-diagrammatical differences for merely Intel quad-cores - from Kentsfield all the way to Haswell. Why did on-die cache top out with Yorkfield? Could it be that large cache amounts reached the point of diminishing returns in terms of performance increases, due to greater efficiencies elsewhere in terms of I/O? Q6600 alone has a larger on-die cache than any Core i-series CPU - including Haswell; Yorkfield has an even larger on-die cache than Kentsfield. In fact, hasn't the amount of on-die cache actually decreased with the i-series? In other words, on-die cache makes less of a difference than ever going forward - however, CPU-specific optimizations have a far-greater impact. Those same CPU-specific (or even CPU-family-specific) optimizations make apples-to-apples comparisons of different CPU families (even within the same company, such as E6600 vs. Q6600 in Supreme Commander) improbable, if not impossible, from a practical POV.

In other words, they aren't exceptions proving the rule, but exceptions proving that they are exceptions. Deep instruction pipelines and clock speeds were the hallmark of Netburst (and the P4); Core (and Core 2, of course) made a mockery of that. Core 2 was all about larger on-die cache, which the i-series is making a mockery of. Does Intel have something in the pipeline that will make a mockery of what the i-series brings to the table? Nobody knows (and I certainly have not even a clue) - it is why future-proofing remains a guessing game at best.
 
Red Squirrel said:
My current server is a core2quad. It maxes out at 8GB of ram, and I want to do more stuff with VMs. My new machine is a Core i7 with motherboard that can support way more ram, think like 32GB, vs 8GB on the server. I have 12GB right now. Thinking of making my new workstation my server, and making the old server my workstation. I run Linux, so speed is not an issue, because it's going to be fast anyway in terms of GUI speed and opening stuff. Also have a SSD. What I'm wondering is, will I take a huge hit in terms of gaming? I don't play super high end games at the moment. Mostly Minecraft, UT3, and the odd Indie game. I don't have any specific newer games in mind, but idealy I'd like to be able to play any other modern game that is out right now if I decide to.

Think I'll be fine if I do this swap? The video card I use now would be put in this older machine (pretty sure I have the slot for it).

I can't see why not, myself, but just thought I'd check. Ultimate goal is to get a rackmount case for the current workstation and put it in the server room as the server, keep the old server there but run the appropriate cables upstairs. Ultra quiet and cool office. :p
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Here's a comparison of the Q9650 versus 2600k so you can see some of the productivity apps and others

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/287?vs=49
 
My kids are using my old Q6600, which my wife was using before them, and it is still going strong.
 
I did forget to say what CPU it is, it is the Q6700 and it's running at 2.66GHz according to /proc/cpuinfo.
 
FWIW: the Core 2 Quad and GTX 650ti boost on my HTPC are a great combo @ 1080p, 60".
 
Modred189 said:
FWIW: the Core 2 Quad and GTX 650ti boost on my HTPC are a great combo @ 1080p, 60".
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My point exactly.

With very few exceptions, (less than five) I'm neither CPU or GPU bottlenecked in any game I have on my system - and that is despite having a system composed entirely of dead hardware. If anything, in most games I am display/monitor bottlenecked or even bottlenecked by the game itself (by that, I mean the game does not take full advantage of what CPU and GPU it's being thrown at). If anything, the exception enthusiasts have it worse than I do where it comes to being bottlenecked by games themselves, as fewer and fewer games are pushing even older hardware, let alone modern hardware (both CPUs and GPUs alike).
And if a developer TRIES to push the hardware envelope (Crytek, DICE, etc.), the pushback is massive - listen to the complainage and gripage that descended on Crytek merely because they *removed* DX9c support from Crysis 3. And that is just gaming - which is second only to development/workstation applications in pushing hardware. General productivity and content consumption has been a snoozefest (in realistic terms) since the era of XP. Is it any wonder that sales of complete desktops are in a two-year drought? (And they would likely STILL be in that drought without the added impetus of crappy economic conditions darn near globally, because the drought began prior to the downturn in the economy.)

It's not fun - and I would think it is less fun the more [H] you are - but it's as real as it gets.
 
Mr. Bluntman said:
Core 2 Quads (if you're talking about the 45nm Yorkfield 12MB ones) are roughly comparable to Phenom II processors: not great but serviceable. Don't expect to max out anything in the GTX 500/Radeon 5000 series GPUs with such a CPU. Modern i5/i7 CPUs are much better for gaming.
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Really? I just got a Phenom II as a hand me down and I already had a Radeon HD5000 series GPU. This interests me now....

Maybe my desktop will be more of a gaming machine than I thought. Not that it takes much to upgrade from an Athlon X2 64bit CPU.
 
PGHammer said:
My current Q6600 (still pushing it) is utterly stock; worse, it's shackled to the CSM (corporate-stable/consumer-stable) chipset that is Intel G41. My current GPU is an nVidia GeForce GTX 550 Ti - also utterly stock. Yet so far I haven been able to play every game I own at 1920x1080 either all-out or nearly all-out. (Included in the mix is Crysis 2 Maximum and Crysis 3 and both SC2 games - the latter two absolutely firewalled.) No SSD; therefore, that's not a factor. I have 4GB of utterly vanilla DDR2 system RAM. (9-9-9-24 CL9) I haven't had to back away from 1920x1080 in any game I have. Therefore, I have to think that if a stock Q6600 isn't a bottleneck, an overclocked Q-series CPU certainly isn't a bottleneck. And the Q6600 has been EOL how many years?
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Riiiight. What FPS are you getting in game?

50563.png
 
q6600 mostly struggles with the games that aren't optimized for quad core (ie. Skyrim) due to the lower raw clockspeed. If you aren't gaming at 120fps, it's still a decent processor for most games. This may not be true once requirements start ramping up from next-gen console ports.
 
guitarguy6 said:
Riiiight. What FPS are you getting in game?

50563.png
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Absolute worst-case, right around 20 fps; however, even that is in very busy sections (Crysis 2/3) - the other difference is that this at both taller resolutions AND higher LOD than was even possible before, and considerably higher in both cases. Therefore, the comparison isn't exactly apples to apples.

The point I am trying to make is that you CAN still get some serious bang and spend little or even VERY little - it simply depends on what you spend on.
 
Red Squirrel said:
That is very interesting... it even performs better than the i7 in some cases. :eek: Mind you it's newer than mine, but still interesting to see.
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It doesnt beat it in anything... But in some of those canned benchmarks the C2Q gets decently close.
 
Red Squirrel said:
My current server is a core2quad. It maxes out at 8GB of ram, and I want to do more stuff with VMs. My new machine is a Core i7 with motherboard that can support way more ram, think like 32GB, vs 8GB on the server. I have 12GB right now. Thinking of making my new workstation my server, and making the old server my workstation. I run Linux, so speed is not an issue, because it's going to be fast anyway in terms of GUI speed and opening stuff. Also have a SSD. What I'm wondering is, will I take a huge hit in terms of gaming? I don't play super high end games at the moment. Mostly Minecraft, UT3, and the odd Indie game. I don't have any specific newer games in mind, but idealy I'd like to be able to play any other modern game that is out right now if I decide to.

Think I'll be fine if I do this swap? The video card I use now would be put in this older machine (pretty sure I have the slot for it).

I can't see why not, myself, but just thought I'd check. Ultimate goal is to get a rackmount case for the current workstation and put it in the server room as the server, keep the old server there but run the appropriate cables upstairs. Ultra quiet and cool office. :p
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A core2quad even stock clocked will be totally fine for the situations you quote here.

A core2quad overclocked to 3.7 would even work great for 1080p windows gaming. With something like a 7870, you could expect about 60+fps average in Battlefield 3 on ultra settings with no AA/post AA such as FXAA or SMAA @ 1080p

While a Haswell would surely hand it it's butt, especially after being overlcocked, most games from the past 7 years don't NEED the latest processors for a single card system at reasonable resolutions. Latest i5/i7 are only really NEEDED to pump out super high res and/or more than 2 graphics cards.
 
x3sphere said:
This may not be true once requirements start ramping up from next-gen console ports.
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Yes, but I think it will still be at least a couple of years before programmers start to take advantage of the new consoles having 8 cores. So the older quad cores still have some life in them yet for gaming.
 
It will be fine. I have a Phenom 2 and I run all my games at 1080p. At this point the video card doing all the hard work. If you want more FPS get a more powerful card.
 
JHefile said:
It will be fine. I have a Phenom 2 and I run all my games at 1080p. At this point the video card doing all the hard work. If you want more FPS get a more powerful card.
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Depends on the game, but yeah typically the GPU is much more important if you have a relatvely-modern CPU (i.e. an enthusiast chip from the last 3-5 years).
 
MavericK96 said:
Depends on the game, but yeah typically the GPU is much more important if you have a relatively-modern CPU (i.e. an enthusiast chip from the last 3-5 years).
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+1 - some games will play better than others, but you may not be able to max things out.
 
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