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Q6600 to i7 920 platform performance gain worthwhile?

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RanceJustice

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I've been reading over quite a few accounts that the performance increase between my current system (Q6600 @ 3.0, other stuff in sig) and a high end i7 system (920 OCed best I can, 6gb RAM, Rampage II Formula) may not be that superior to be worth the price at current? On the other hand, since the current X58 and i7 setup is, to my knowledge, pretty much top of the line until at least this time next year, will there really be price drops (aside from DDR3 of course)?

I have a girlfriend ready to buy my newegg wishlist for me, but I don't want her to spend roughly $1000 on upgrades if its not necessary, and that there will be a huge price drop or better quality stuff coming out soon. Thanks.
 
Quality DDR3 should be less than 1/2 the current price in 1 year. Also motherboards for the i7 should be significantly cheaper.
 
If you have a Q6600 already and the uses are mostly gaming, it's probably not worth spending 1000 on an i7. The performance gains are minimal for gaming. It's more for video encoding and other things like that. They will get cheaper for sure later, especially when the LGA1160 version comes out
 
If you buy the Intel Core i7 based system now you'll be paying the early adopter tax since you'll be spending CPU $300+, X58 MB $300+, DDR3 RAM $250+ and you'll only get a few percent higher performance than your current setup. The biggest performance difference you'll see is if you're doing media encoding otherwise your benchmarks difference will be just slightly higher than your current setup and highly disappointing.

Check out the discussion in the thread below on buying the i7 now or waiting for i5.
[thread=1373662] i5 (LGA1166) due 2nd half 2009 : ( : ( : ( worth the wait? [/thread]

Or better yet, read any of the dozens reviews out that that basically reach the same conclusion that if you have a recently build system than the i7 isn't worth the upgrade due to the similar performance to Core 2 systems and higher early adopter prices for performance X58 chipset MB and DDR3 RAM prices.

Save your money till next year and the i5 if you really have a need to upgrade.
 
Your only running the Q6600 at 3Ghz? It is crying to be overclocked more. Even 3.4Ghz should be easy as pie to get to and 3.6Ghz shouldn't be that much harder as long as you have decent cooling.

Even with current games and programs, it is not worth it at all to "upgrade" to the I7 platform unless you are specifically seeing slowdown related to your CPU being too slow or your RAM throughput not being high enough.
 
For raw computing power, the i7 920 is superior to the Q6600 and quite cheap for the computing power you get. And you can easily overclock significantly it without raising voltages.

On the other hand, if raw computing power isn't exactly your priority, and if all you do is play games and surf, forget it. Keep your Q6600.
 
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