jump ship from my Q6600?

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Budzman

[H]ard|Gawd
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I seriously cant make up my mind on wether to upgrade to a i7 930 or just stick with what I got till the next gen of intel boards.

Almost pulled the trigger last night on $800+ on a new mobo, cpu, ram but common sense kicked in and stopped me.

My current rig is a Q6600@3360mhz 1680fsb, 4gb ram @ 504mhz, 295gtx overclocked.

Just need a little more power to run BC2, I would like to run that game with 8x AA and atleast all medium settings @ 1920x1200. Right now i can run it at 4x AA with mixed medium and low settings for the graphics to keep my frame rates up.

I cant go SLI since my mobo only has 1 pci-e slot so it's either keep this for the time being or upgrade the mobo/cpu/ram to see if that helps out any.
 
I was on the same mindframe a while back.

For me going to i7 was going to be $1000 for cpu, mobo, and dd3 RAM. It occoured to me that that is NOT an upgrade. That is a new build.

And for a new build, Q6600 -> i7 930 just was not enough of a jump for my taste.

For me, there is nothing that I am doing that is being held up by my Q6600.

A SSD might be more inline for an upgrade in my case.
 
Ive been debating this a lot recently, havent been able to pull the trigger on the 930 upgrade yet. Right now im putting some money away and hoping to build a box around the evga sr2 when they release it.
 
Budzman said:
I seriously cant make up my mind on wether to upgrade to a i7 930 or just stick with what I got till the next gen of intel boards.

Almost pulled the trigger last night on $800+ on a new mobo, cpu, ram but common sense kicked in and stopped me.

My current rig is a Q6600@3360mhz 1680fsb, 4gb ram @ 504mhz, 295gtx overclocked.

Just need a little more power to run BC2, I would like to run that game with 8x AA and atleast all medium settings @ 1920x1200. Right now i can run it at 4x AA with mixed medium and low settings for the graphics to keep my frame rates up.

I cant go SLI since my mobo only has 1 pci-e slot so it's either keep this for the time being or upgrade the mobo/cpu/ram to see if that helps out any.
Click to expand...

The problem you are describing is a graphics card problem, not motherboard/CPU/RAM. Higher resolutions and quality settings are going to be bottlenecked by the video card, especially with regards to AA since AA relies on the RAM framebuffer on the video card as well as the ability of the videocard to process the AA fast enough.

 
Well I made the jump from a q6600 to a i7 920 a few months ago and never looked back. But the move for me had nothing to do with video games.

Since you are looking for better AA in a game I think you should be looking at a better video card. I don’t think an i7 is going to need a new video card or a second card for SLI to get what you’re looking for and in the end a new faster single card is going to be the cheapest option.

But now I have to ask if you are serious. You are actually considering spending $800+ on a new system or even if you take my advice $500 or so on a video card. Just to go from 4xAA to 8xAA in a fast passed shooter? You really find you have the time to notice a lack of AA even though you’re running at 4xAA?
 
I made the jump for the gpu flexibility. Especially if you ever want eyefinity or surround in the future. GPU will always be your limit there. i7 combo should give you a VERY long life for gaming and the ability to switch from 1/2 gpus and ATI/Nvidia.
 
I agree that it is more of a gpu thing but i would think the newer cpu/mobo would help out in gaming atleast somewhat.
 
TGA - why did you upgrade your q6600 if not for gaming?

I'm in a similar boat, my q6600 is running at 3.6ghz watercooled and I now that I'm doing more photo and video editing I'm really noticing it taking a while to render a 1080p video..but I can't justify the cost at the moment.
 
SmokeRngs said:
The problem you are describing is a graphics card problem, not motherboard/CPU/RAM. Higher resolutions and quality settings are going to be bottlenecked by the video card, especially with regards to AA since AA relies on the RAM framebuffer on the video card as well as the ability of the videocard to process the AA fast enough.
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What he said. Seems very unlikely that you'd be CPU limited with a Q6600 @ 3.3.
 
Here is the CPU scaling for BC2:
http://www.techspot.com/article/255-battlefield-bad-company2-performance/page7.html

You'll still see some CPU scaling benefit in BC2 if you monitor limits you to 1920x1200 and your process will clock higher than 3GHz. If you go higher than 1920x1200 BC2 becomes GPU limited.

Here are the charts for GPU scaling:
http://www.techspot.com/article/255-battlefield-bad-company2-performance/page5.html

You still see a good bump up going from a GTX285 to a 5870. Not sure what the difference is coming from a GTX295 or going to a 5890.
 
i'm waiting for sandy bridge before i make the jump too. My q6600 @ 3.4 runs games great right now and i'm sure it'll still be fine for the next year. This build was great considering it's age (nearing 3 years in a few months), but the upgrade itch is getting me bad. I can't wait for intel's next "tock" release.
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There are hardly any games out there right now that really require more than a Q6600 @ 3.4-3.6GHz. GTA IV does but I can't think of any others. For the rest and high resolutions, it is mostly a GPU ram issue.
 
chart above showing cpu benefit is also utilizing two 5870's. a single 5870 won't keep your cpu near as busy.
 
I am running an Q6700. It's temping to upgrade, but after getting my intel SSD, 99% of my tasks are limited by me and my mouse clicks, not my computer.

If I were ripping video all day, I would want a faster CPU. But for gaming and office tasks, I am doing fine for now.
 
I have a Q6600 at 3.4 ghz and it runs BC2 high settings with 2AA on 1920x1200 monitor on the 4890. To op, I would say turn down AA and jack up the graphics settings to the max I don't really think an i7 will be worth the cost for the jump if you are just gonna game, surf the web and occasional encode.
 
When I have my Q9550 @ 3.4GHz I see no reason to upgrade anything besides my GPU and perhaps to a PCI express 2.0 motherboard. Hell, even at it's current stock 2.83GHz clock it's plenty fast for everything I do/play. However, after running the math I just can't swallow the red i7 pill because of the cost not justified by the performance gains in games. And it's not like I edit or encode 1080p video all day or do rendering, and that is really the only reason I see to upgrade to an i7 over a fast Penryn based C2Q ATM.
 
Did a very modest upgrade last year from a Q6600 @ 3.6Ghz to a Q9550 @ 3.8Ghz. Really wasn't a full "upgrade" as I needed the Q6600 for a "Kitchen PC" Shuttle XPC build at the time, so more a lateral transfer.

A Q6600 to a i7 would be a decent bump, but I agree that the same money spent on a SSD and a beefier graphics setup would be MUCH more noticeable as far as the "seat of the pants" effect goes. And as others have said, going from a Q6600 to an i7 isn't an upgrade... it's pretty much a whole damn new system!
 
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I only went from a Q9450 to an i7-920 because I have been using that rig for video editing and encoding using prosumer software. The rig that I'm posting from now has the Q9450 (it used to have a 2.80C GHz Pentium 4 until recently). I have been moving parts that were previously used as a main rig to my secondary and tertiary rigs to replace parts which are no longer properly supported in Windows 7.
 
Supercharged_Z06 said:
Did a very modest upgrade last year from a Q6600 @ 3.6Ghz to a Q9550 @ 3.8Ghz. Really wasn't a full "upgrade" as I needed the Q6600 for a "Kitchen PC" Shuttle XPC build at the time, so more a lateral transfer.

A Q6600 to a i7 would be a decent bump, but I agree that the same money spent on a SSD and a beefier graphics setup would be MUCH more noticeable as far as the "seat of the pants" effect goes. And as others have said, going from a Q6600 to an i7 isn't an upgrade... it's pretty much a whole damn new system!
Click to expand...

Is it that big a difference to a "whole damn new system" even if your Q6600 or Q9550 is @ 3.6-3.8GHz?
 
obey3one said:
Ive been debating this a lot recently, havent been able to pull the trigger on the 930 upgrade yet. Right now im putting some money away and hoping to build a box around the evga sr2 when they release it.
Click to expand...

Considering I recently forced upgraded to a i7 930 from a Q6600 overclocked to 3.2ghz I will say I noticed the difference in games (I game at 1920x1200) and benchmarking programs but my Q6600 was dieing out for months and doing lots of weird stuff.. it would error out constantly I would have to downclock it to get it working solid again.

If you have a nice solid Q6600 the difference isn't enough right now to warrant an upgrade , wait for cheap 6-core Intel chips to come out and the upgrade to that. If you're system is dieing or died like mine then its a good upgrade.
 
Spare-Flair said:
Is it that big a difference to a "whole damn new system" even if your Q6600 or Q9550 is @ 3.6-3.8GHz?
Click to expand...

The jump from my Q6600 to my Q9550 was pretty minor. Gained perhaps a 5-10% overall bump in performance when it was all done. Primarily did it because the wife wanted a quad in her PC for better multitasking, so I got to buy a shiny, newer quad. :) If someone is considering going form a Q6600 to a i7, well, you also pretty much have to invest in a complete new motherboard and RAM, so you end up spending quite a bit - close to what it costs for an entirely new PC.

As to your question, I personally think that if someone has Q6600 or Q9550 quad that is reliably dialed in at 3.6GHz or better, that it pretty much makes zero sense to step up to a i7. (Unless of course you also are planning to heavily overclock the i7 and don't mind blowing lots of cash for a very modest effective performance gain.) With an older quad at those speeds, most games are GPU bound anyway and the money one would dump into an i7 setup (CPU/MB/RAM) would be much better spent boosting GPU and perhaps disk performance.
 
How is an i7 going to help with with AA? Thats entirely video card dependant.
 
The q6600 is definitely a bottleneck in BC2 -- I'm in the exact same boat. I'm trying to hold out for a cpu based on the newer 2011 socket, but we'll see. My cpu sits at 95%+ while in game. All that said 8x AA is a pretty ambitious goal -- I would focus on running higher overall settings before trying to jack the AA all the way up.
 
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