[email protected] Vs Q9650@4GHz in gaming only (in 2009)

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Brutus75

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Which would be the best option between the E8600 at 4.5 GHz and a Q9650 at 4 Ghz strictly for gaming this year and maybe the first quarter of 2010? I play at 1680x1050.
 
Well if your just planning on using it for the rest of the year and maybe some in '10, I suggest getting the e8600. If you want something that will be more future proof go with the quad. But with the 8600 clocked that high it will defiantly perform better than the 9650 in today's games.
 
If you're spending that much I would just get a Q9650. It will be a good cpu if you plan on keeping the computer after you buy your next one. I wonder if you would even see the difference at those speeds anyway.
 
Dual core for gaming is at the end of its life IMHO, but by that i mean for people who are buying right now. A Core2 will be plenty CPU for some time yet, but quads are just too competitively priced for gamers. Unless your on some kind of strict budget, I would go with the Q9650, and keep it for longer than a year. I am also assuming you already have a motherboard for these CPUs, and ram. I just bought one and ill probably have it for at least two years unless somethign else comes out thats a hell of alot better, which i dont think is going to happen. Core i7 isnt impressing me at all, so i dont expect Core i5 will either.
 
At those speeds I doubt you'd see any difference between the two except on something like SupCom or Flight Sim that takes heavy advantage of multiple cores. What video card matters, because you'll like be GPU bound even at that resolution.
 
flip a coin it doesn't matter you wont notice a difference.

Hell you can even step down to a e7400 at 3.5 for $120.
 
Q9650. You will be GPU-limited at those speeds with either chip, and in a CPU-limited situation the Q9650 will be faster in more cases due to the two additional cores.
 
Right now I have an E6750 at 3.8GHz. The CPU upgrade is mainly because of Team Fortress 2, in heavy battles I get down to the 30-40 FPS zone and it's not too pleasant. I have different options for an upgrade. The most efficient money wise I found it to be an E8600, a GTX 285 (currently I have an ATI HD4870 512 MB) and one terrabyte drive. The CPU upgrade won't cost me very much if I choose the E8600.
 
Why not clock the Q9650 to 4.5Ghz as well? :p

Anyways, i kinda do agree with dual core at its end due to how decent quads are being priced right now, but their still more than enough and im sure will be for this year.
 
For 1680 x 1050 the GTX 285 is kind of overkill - the 260 would likely give you nearly identical frame rates.
 
OP: You may be having software issues. I didn't have any problems with slowdowns in TF2 on a 4850 512MB @ 1680x1050. Your CPU wouldn't have that type of impact on TF2 perfomance, as 3.8GHz is plenty fast. Initially, I had a similar problem with low frames on the 4850 that was resolved by a total reinstallation of Vista. A 4870 should be toasting that game.

http://www.yougamers.com/forum/showthread.php?t=85042

And that benchmark is @ 1920x1200 on older drivers with a processor that may be slower than your own in TF2... it doesn't have minimum frames, but I'm still thinking your problem is software related. That is my best guess, anyhow. Like I said, I had no problems with minimum framerates after a system wipe, and I believe I ran my CPU @ 4GHz, then, with a 4850 @ your resolution.
 
Really depends more on how much juice you are willing to put in for your chip.

@ www.3DGameMan.com Rodney got a E8400 E0 and only achieved 4.5GHz with 1.55v while me personally with my 'good binned' E8400 C0 got 4.6GHz 1.457v actual (these voltages aren't stable at these clocks)
http://i39.tinypic.com/ndsm1j.jpg
But granted my CPU, I could reach 4.5GHz for sure total 24/7 stability with better cooling & under 1.45v

Another member of the forum there got his Q9650 to 4.2GHz ROCK SOLID STABLE @ only 1.33v peak actual

So it's all luck of the draw
 
Good lord man, i have a e6750, what kind of cooler you got on that thing? 3.52 is the highest i can go(stable)
Ironically, i just bought a q9650 last week and it clocks much better than the dual core, but of course with the die shrink and all. I'm sitting pretty at 4.05 at the moment. Played around 11 hrs of Eternal Silence (f'n awesome source mod! just came out, you guys have got to play this), yesterday (i was home, sick), and not once did I notice the frames dip below 60. All graphics maxed out 16aa, 16af, blah blah.. That was on a 32 player server, that was full pretty much all day.

TF2 is the same story. Heavy moments on big maps used to drop the fps from over 60, down to 20-30s, with the dual core. That does not happen with the q9650. This chip has basically erased my minimum frame rate in all my games. Instead of running 60fps, some of the time, now its ALL of the time.

My friend has a e8400. I'm not sure of the clock, but i know its overclocked. That thing does not touch THIS chip. You will appreciate the extra cores today, and even more so, later. I think I'm going to keep this chip. (2 week eval)

Another vote for the Q9650
 
S3th13 said:
Not true. TF2 is pretty demanding on my 4870 512 with 8x AA and Max AF at 1680x1050.
Click to expand...

8xAA chokes on the 512MB cards, but runs fine on the 4870 1GB. I run 8xAA in every game I play at 1920x1200 with the exception of Far Cry 2 and Crysis.
 
I run 16xQ AA and 16xAF with max graphics, on my 8800 GTS 512 @ 1680x1050.
 
isn't TF2 heavily CPU limited?
Thats always the impression when I see people with 4870s/GTX2x0s saying they dip down in the 30s during heavy battles. Like 32 people battles
 
ihira said:
isn't TF2 heavily CPU limited?
Thats always the impression when I see people with 4870s/GTX2x0s saying they dip down in the 30s during heavy battles. Like 32 people battles
Click to expand...

TF2 is all about the highest clocks you can get right now since it isn't multithreaded yet. I get 60fps at 8xCSAA but my setup chokes a little at 16xQCSAA. BTW I run at 1080p, 8xCSAA, 16xAF, everything maxed with mat_picmip -10.
 
LeviathanZERO said:
Good lord man, i have a e6750, what kind of cooler you got on that thing? 3.52 is the highest i can go(stable)
Click to expand...

TRUE with 2 1600 RPM fans. :D
 
I would not buy a dual core when there are similarly priced quad that can perform almost as well. It's just more sensible to have a quad when multi threading will inevitably be the norm. It's the direction computing in general is heading and it's just not smart to go against to flow on this imo. Good luck
 
I just bagged my [email protected] for a [email protected]. I had both running for a while and while the e8600 would peak better in certain apps the Q just feels snappier and maintains higher averages across the board.

Also, I think the q9550 or e8500 are rignt on the bang/$ sweet spot these days -
 
Personally, I would go with the E8600 because I'm still not convinced developers are gonna quit being lazy and start writing multi-thread apps.
 
CamaroZ28 said:
Personally, I would go with the E8600 because I'm still not convinced developers are gonna quit being lazy and start writing multi-thread apps.
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They will have to one way or another within the near future.
 
CamaroZ28 said:
Trust me, I really really hope they do, but it seems that its not being pushed as strongly as it should be...
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They won't really have a choice. Intel and AMD are both moving to more highly-parallel CPUs rather than faster individual cores, so for software devs to take advantage of the extra power of newer CPUs, they'll have to multithread their apps. It's going slowly, but it will definitely happen.
 
the resale value on the 9550 is better :)

I really think going quad is just a safer, all around better choice now.
 
I would not recommend any dual core unless they are for budget builds. Only then I would maybe recommend 5xxx/7xxx. Quad was the future.. future is now almost here.
 
Zero82z said:
They won't really have a choice. Intel and AMD are both moving to more highly-parallel CPUs rather than faster individual cores, so for software devs to take advantage of the extra power of newer CPUs, they'll have to multithread their apps. It's going slowly, but it will definitely happen.
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I know they are moving to highly-parallel CPU's but it still seems to me that even though that is happening, that isn't enough to really get developers to multithread their apps. I mean the C2Q has been around since what.. Nov. 2006, and we are just now finally starting to see games use more the 2 cores, yet there are still many apps that don't use more then 1 or 2 cores.

Don't get me wrong... I'm not trying to bash on anything, I think its just the fact the developers are so slow to move over to multithreading that its depressing me...
 
CamaroZ28 said:
Personally, I would go with the E8600 because I'm still not convinced developers are gonna quit being lazy and start writing multi-thread apps.
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This.

Zero82z said:
They will have to one way or another within the near future.
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Agreed. Intel's roadmaps relegate dual cores to low power notebooks and low-end desktops next year. With 6 and 8 core CPUs being introduced by next year from Intel and AMD, developers will have no excuse other than laziness to not harness these extra cores.

CamaroZ28 said:
Trust me, I really really hope they do, but it seems that its not being pushed as strongly as it should be...
Click to expand...

Because quads account for less than 10% of the market? If you don't have a wide user base to take advantage of the extra effort for programming in support for such a "complex" feature, it's not economically sound or profitable for a buisness to do so. After all, the bottom line of a game studio or publisher is ultimately to make money. Until the majority of gamers have quad cores or better in their systems, I'm not expecting widespread support for them.
 
multithreading is rapidly increasing in games simply cause the 360 and PS3 have 3+ cores, so many games are developed to squeeze very last bit of power from the consoles.

If you like swapping CPUs, it's ok to buy dual core now, and quad a year later - it's not like any new games come out in months besides November anyway. :)
 
I can run TF2 @ 1680x1050 on my Q6600 at 3.0 with my 8800GT maxed with no problems. Not sure what issues you're having. Sounds more software related than anything.
 
Brutus75 said:
Right now I have an E6750 at 3.8GHz. The CPU upgrade is mainly because of Team Fortress 2, in heavy battles I get down to the 30-40 FPS zone and it's not too pleasant. I have different options for an upgrade. The most efficient money wise I found it to be an E8600, a GTX 285 (currently I have an ATI HD4870 512 MB) and one terrabyte drive. The CPU upgrade won't cost me very much if I choose the E8600.
Click to expand...

How much ram do you have?

I'm still not understanding this, TF2 as with most source games is easy on pc components. I run 8xAA and 16xAF@1650x1080. This is on a 4850 512mb . With both an E8400 and a Q9650 both at 3.6Ghz. But I cannot play GRID with more than 4x AA or it bogs bad into the 30 fps range average, and I have seen that in a 4870 review the 1GB card flew past this hurtle with GRID compared to a 512mb card that struggled.

Your 3.8Ghz is not a bottle neck, have you seen the article where it shows gains of only 2-3fps max on higher cpu speeds?? Here:


Your silly to upgrade to a E8600, a quad is a good option but dont think its going to fix your issue. Most of the time you get a better video card if you want better FPS, all this "bottlenecking" talk has people paranoid.
 
Ya agreed, I completely missed that post where he said he had the E6750. That CPU is definitely not bottle necking your game. If that is your only reason for upgrading then that would be silly as a E8x00 would only gain you 2MB more of cache and a quad core would be useless for that game as it only uses 2 threads.

Now something is definitely wrong with your system because I play at the same resolution as you and have a 4850 and never drop below 60FPS with max settings in TF2.
Check your drivers, having drivers not installed properly or an outdated driver can cause performance issues with ATi cards, I know because I had a lot of performance issues with my 4850 in the past.
 
SpeedEuphoria said:
How much ram do you have?
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4 Gigs. I have de lattest drivers for the graphics card. Tried different sets of drivers, still the same. Graphical Intense games run flawlessly.
 
That is pretty usual, I played TF2 yesterday and my FPS bearly ever dropped below 100 at max settings max AA/AF @ 1680x1050. Rig in sig.
 
I was initially wondering if Windows 7 would benefit significantly from Quads. After reading this article, and seing that I won't be running any database apps on my home PC.....the diference between C2D - C2Q, seems really to be nothing worthwhile for everyday usage/apps.

http://www.infoworld.com/article/09/01/22/03TC-windows-multicore_1.html

I've got pretty much the same question as the OP, though my games are limited to shooters. In which case, and @ stock clock, an e8600 makes more sense.
 
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