I5 750 vs Q9550

NathanP2007 said:
I partly want to say well if you can upgrade and it cost you barely anything, go for it. But honestly i think your system can handle almost everything extremely well, even if you upgraded to a i7 and things were a bit snappier, a few seconds faster when encoding things..is that worth it? Do you need those 3 seconds? I know i dont.
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You're missing the point. There's no asking if it's worth it. He can sell / he sold his 775 setup and got enough money from the sale to buy a current setup w/o shelling out anymore money than what he made on the sale.

Most of us do this as a hobby and make every excuse to have the latest and greatest. For many of us, building a new system is something we enjoy.

If he had waited for six core processors to sell his 775 setup he wouldn't have gotten as much. With the iX setup he'll make more than he would have on the 775 setup when it comes time to sell and trade up to a six core setup.
 
IsLNdbOi said:
You're missing the point. There's no asking if it's worth it. He can sell / he sold his 775 setup and got enough money from the sale to buy a current setup w/o shelling out anymore money than what he made on the sale.

Most of us do this as a hobby and make every excuse to have the latest and greatest. For many of us, building a new system is something we enjoy.

If he had waited for six core processors to sell his 775 setup he wouldn't have gotten as much. With the iX setup he'll make more than he would have on the 775 setup when it comes time to sell and trade up to a six core setup.
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But it was also brought up that we didnt know exactly how equaled out he would be when he parted his system and got a i5, and he started asking about getting a i7, which would obviously cost more than a i5. And i never said i disagree that if you lose no money (or even close to none) that you should upgrade..your essentially getting better for free, so duh do it.

Btw i get that its a hobby and building for fun, i build for fun, i just ordered some 775 parts to build a PC, but he didnt bring that up, he was asking what performance boost he would get with i5 over Q9550. I was telling him that if hes looking for a reason to upgrade, performance is basically the lowest on the list of good reasons (unless you do video/picture editing and all that CPU intensive stuff).
 
I went from a Q9550 to i5-750, and there weren't any noticeable improvements on normal usage. I definitely don't notice any improvements playing games (bf:bc2,l4d2,tf2) since my R4890 is limiting me from turning up the eyecandy on bf:bc2 and I like my game to be silky smooth.

Encoding movies on the i5 750 is probably faster than the Q9550 but I usually just let it run overnight or when I need to step away from the computer.

Selling your current rig and jumping to the i5 750 without taking a big hit from the wallet is probably worth it just for a little bit of future proofing with usb3 and ddr3. If not, the Q9550 has plenty of life in it.
 
I would do it, if little money is involved. You will have newer hardware, you can sell later, at a better price, for the next cheap upgrade. You dont want to get too many generations behind if you want to recover a good bit of your purchase price.
 
The last game I really go into was L4D. I played the crap out of that and really, really enjoyed it. Part of that enjoyment was because I never saw less than 50~60 frames as a minimum. Anything less than that and it'll mess w/ my aim, my eyes, and my head.

Eventually, I got tired of L4D and moved over to BC2. I hated it. Now I knew part of that was due to the low framerate, but something else was driving me nuts. The game hitched or stuttered on occasion w/ huge down spikes in framerate on an E8400 GTX 260. Looking at that and the system requirements made it pretty clear that a Q9550 was needed.

While it definitely smoothed things out, my avg and min framerate still hit too low. So I did the next logical thing and put a 470 in there. I actually get worse performance on that than the 260, haah. Something about nvidia not updating drivers to run BC2 for months. Guess there's a fix finally.

I really do like this game and if an i7 will boost it up even more, than it's a real solution. Sure, I'm just gaming, but that's what BC2 wants. And BC2 gets what BC2 wants. :D
 
lol no its not worth it even if you get it for free. People always seem to forget that the q9550 beats the i7 in some gaming benchmarks at the same mhz. Now don't get me wrong the i7 wins most, but not all. Do I need to even mention the i5? If you plan on using multiple video cards or do a lot of video editing or rendering get the i7.

The i5 is the most pointless series of cpu's that has ever existed. Go i7 or stick with what you have.

Don't take mine or anyone elses word for it, look at the benchmarks.

Also 2 years down the road the q9550 will be worth more (look to the high end 939 cpus for reference).

edit: just realized this thread is old
 
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Multi GPU setups get a bit of hitching the the fsb, switching to I7 won't net you much, but since the PCIe controller is on die, it will noticeably smoother.
 
kaptnkain said:
Multi GPU setups get a bit of hitching the the fsb, switching to I7 won't net you much, but since the PCIe controller is on die, it will noticeably smoother.
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The on-die PCI-E controller doesn't make a difference. The LGA1366 platform doesn't have it on-die and that platform is still the best for multi-GPU gaming and anything else.
 
It uses QPI interface for both applications. QPI offers a hell of a lot more bandwidth than the old fsb design.
 
Perfect. So how have games changed from the Q9550? What about apps? Just fire away at your impressions!
 
Single threaded apps showed semi-minor improvements in the range of 5-8% on average, if I remember correctly between i7920 with HT enabled versus a Core 2 Quad Q6600....If you game, an i7 will stomp the Q6600 because of the 192-bit 3 channel memory controller, on-die....PERIOD!!
 
kniaugaudiskis said:
Well, if you can sell your current mobo/ram/CPU at a good price then I'd say it's worth changing, especially if you're working with video encoding/decoding applications, perform large compressions etc, then at the same frequency i5 750 would offer around 20 - 25% performance increase over Q9550 due to added new instructions (like SSE4.2) and other architectural changes. Like digitalgunfire has already noticed, you'd have to run SLI at 8x/8x, since EVGA P55 FTW doesn't have NF200 chip, but you should not be worried, since even crossfired HD5870s at 8x/8x PCI-E 2.0 have no performance loss campared to 16x/16x.
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more like 16% per clock
 
As far as noticing a difference - wait it out until x65, octacore sandy bridge LGA 2011 ie. socket 'R'.
 
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NathanP2007 said:
People keep saying if you dont notice a difference then your not taxing your system hard enough. And im sure thats true, but just cause im not taxing my system enough to notice the difference, does that mean i should pick up Video encoding as a hobby just to notice the difference between my old CPU and this new intel i-x cpu? (or in my case my new Q9550)
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Old thread and all, but I really have to agree with Nathan on this (and the rest of his post). More often it's the want rather than the need, and I'm sure most of the time the actual gain wouldn't be noticed at all without benchmarking.

I know I went from a Q6600 to an E5200 and then soon after to an i5 750, and in general Windows usage I honestly wouldn't have been able to tell which one of the three I was using. Now, do something very CPU intensive or play a maxed out game (not that I had a suitable GPU for that until recently), sure, the E5200 especially would've been a limiting a factor, but the Q6600 would still have been quite passable in place of the new i5. And honestly, I don't do that many taxing things outside of gaming these days. So, I would still be quite fine with the Q6600.

I mostly swapped systems because I wanted a SFF system (ITX), but then was lured in by Lynnfield (went with mATX because I still wanted small, and that was the smallest available at launch). Right now my system is pretty nice, and my recent SSD purchase was by far a more noticeable upgrade than any CPU swap would've been.

Having had most of the system for a year now, barring the recent GPU, SSD and extra RAM as well as CPU cooler, I figure it should be good to go for at least another two years without any significant changes. As another of my wishes swapping from the Q6600 was to go for a system with lesser power consumption and "being green", the latter I actually failed at with two basically unnecessary system swaps. So now I gotta try and make up for it by sticking with what I have ;) If I can go for more than two more years, nice. If I can't... well, no can do. But at 3 years with one CPU, it'd be a record for me for sure.
 
digitalgunfire said:
I honestly doubt you will see much difference at all.

I haven't looked at SLI much on the P55 but I don't believe it supports 16x/16x.
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The P55 FTW does not support 16 x 16, but so what. 16 x 16 not bringing much to the table that your not already getting with 8 x 8. I'm running two GTX 460 in SLI on the eVGA P55 FTW and the performance in incredible on a 30" 2560x1600 monitor.
 
This was a very enlightening thread and it makes me want to pull my Q9550 out of it's 775 socket and give it a BIG hug as I was contemplating the jump to an i5 platform.

-Flake
 
I sold my Q9550 for a very good price and went to an i5 750 @ 4GHz... with change to spare. :) Can I notice the difference between the two? Not really. It does bench quicker though. And if you end up breaking even (or making a small profit like I did :p) then why not? Its free performance.
 
Would you mind sharing what you got for your cpu/ram/mobo for those of us still on the LGA775 bandwagon?
 
PornFlake said:
This was a very enlightening thread and it makes me want to pull my Q9550 out of it's 775 socket and give it a BIG hug as I was contemplating the jump to an i5 platform.

-Flake
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This post makes me want to leave my 760 in its socket and laugh at my friend who bought my Q9550.
 
R-Type said:
Would you mind sharing what you got for your cpu/ram/mobo for those of us still on the LGA775 bandwagon?
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Well I'm in Australia so the prices aren't directly comparible (although in saying that our $ has reached parity with the USD! :cool:) but I sold my Q9550 for $250, MSI P45 Neo-F mobo for $50 and 4GB DDR2-800 for $100, so $350 all up.

Ended up buying a 2nd hand i7 750 / Gigabyte P55-UD3 / 4GB DDR3-1333 plus a TX3 HSF and a few 120mm cases for $370. I'd estimate the CPU/mobo/RAM would have cost me $~330?
 
I dunno, it feels smoother to me. I'm getting better framerate in BC2 and L4D2 as well. But I installed the newest Nvidia drivers and I'm pretty sure they had a large part to do w/ the improvement in BC2.
 
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