e4500 -> e8400. worth it?

T

THRESHIN

2[H]4U
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friend offered me his C2D e8400 for $50....trying to decide if the upgrade is worth it.

currently i have the e4500 cranked up to a little shy of 3Ghz on water. the thing i'm trying to decide is if its worth getting the e8400 or save the $50 and scrap this system sooner. its not a bad system, but its getting there...the whole point of spending the $50 would be to make it last longer with the possibility of another video card upgrade later. i'm very good at not caring about lower framerates as long as its playable, not a big deal for me. well i can play just about anything at or reasonably near high details and not care:

e4500
4GB DDR2 800Mhz
radon 5770 1GB

only care about pushing a 24" 1920x1200 monitor and nothing more.

my only complaint is that i have only 4 SATA 2.0 ports with this mainboard. have a kingston SSD which is SATA 3 of course. and i also have 2 other mech HDD's, so that leaves me with one DVD drive...like having two. minor complaint though.

so what kind of performance boost do you guys think i could get here? overclocking is obligatory;) shoot for the 4Ghz! if it gets me another year i might be down for this.
 
It's a fairly nice upgrade, especially if you crank that E8400 to 4ghz. What you could do is buy that proc, then sell your old one for like $20. At that point your only giving up $30. But then again, if you are planning to upgrade big or something, then that money could be put to that use. It all depends. Though with that 5770 in there, I would almost think you would be better off saving the money that would be spent plus more, then selling your current rig and upgrading. There are good deals here on the forum, it is how I kept my sandybridge under $900 :).
 
thanks for the reply! the forums are a great idea for most, but.....i'm in canada:p most of you tools won't ship up here even if i pay extra!

my thought is grab this one, and sell the e4500. very correct that i can make my $$ back somewhat. then get another year out of my system. yes may upgrade video along the way and then carry it over to new build, but to be honest i'm finding that this card is keeping up just fine for what i'm playing. little slow in world of tanks but meh the CPU will help with that.

bah decisions....
 
I'm kind of conflicted about this one. $50 isn't a lot of money, and an E8400 with a SSD is still a pretty nice system(I use mine for office work), but there's also the view that the money might be put to better use if you save it to put toward buying a more recent architecture.

To put it in perspective, An E8400 is a 4 year old processor. If you can get it to 4GHz(I was only able to keep mine stable at 3.6), it's just about comparable to one of the lower-end Sandy Bridge processors released about a year and a half ago - the Pentium G620 running at a stock 2.6GHz. This is about the minimum that anyone recommends buying when people are looking for advice about putting together new systems, and spending $50 on the E8400 will bring your computer to that performance point.

Of course if you decide to go for the most current architecture, you get SATA 3.0, USB 3.0, PCIe 3.0 and a much higher ceiling on your performance. However, this will also cost a lot more -- $300 to $600 for the motherboard, RAM, and CPU.

It's a hard decision and it depends entirely how satisfied you are with your current system. Eventually you're going to run into performance issues necessitating a brand-new build, and the $50 E8400 will only push the day of reckoning back a short ways.
 
pointless.

$100 can get you an amd quad with a mobo that takes ddr2. (both used)
 
Do not pay for dual cores at this point, no matter what.

Sell your rig, and get some used AMD based platfom with PII 955, oc it and enjoy decent gaming...

You will be bottle necked by your processor in new games, no matter how big oc you will get from it, 2 core are not enough at this point.
 
psyside said:
Do not pay for dual cores at this point, no matter what.

Sell your rig, and get some used AMD based platfom with PII 955, oc it and enjoy decent gaming...

You will be bottle necked by your processor in new games, no matter how big oc you will get from it, 2 core are not enough at this point.
Click to expand...

Core2Quads can still keep up when OC'd. That's a far better choice than upgrading the whole system.

You can get a Q6600 for as low as $60 these days
 
at this point if i don't take the e8400 i'm just holding out for a complete rebuild. i usually wait until it outright won't play something. elder scrolls broke two of my old systems! damn you morrowind and oblivion!

thanks for the replies
 
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