Q6600 upgrade to a Q9550?

Q6600 upgrade to a Q9550

  • Don't upgrade!

    Votes: 63 73.3%

  • Worth the upgrade.

    Votes: 14 16.3%

  • What's Socket 775?

    Votes: 9 10.5%
  • Total voters
    86
S

Sparkyy

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Mar 16, 2006
Messages
1,166
So after looking around and trying to find some recent posts I have decided to ask this question on an upgrade.

As my sig states I have a Q6600 @ 3.2GHz however I was just looking around and was wondering if solely upgrading my cpu to a Q9550 @ 3.4GHz would be worth it? No photoshop or encoding but gaming and VMs is the usual workload.

I saw in another post that they have the Q9550 at Microcenters for $150 or so and according an old post at anandtech, my 8800GTs are still quite capable of keeping up with a single GTX280.

SSD would be nice but don't have the money to drop on a version larger than 64gb so just looking at processors right now.

Any thoughts would be appreciated. :D:):D
 
For gaming and VM, not worth it. Hell even for video encoding or photoshop it's a bit of a stretch.
 
Just curious - why are you being so conservative with your overclocks? You should be able to push another 200-400Mhz out of your Q6600 and if you got a Q9550 I'd think you could get it to at least 3.8-4Ghz.

I upgraded recently from a Q6600 G0 @ 3.6Ghz to a Q9650 E0 @ 4.4Ghz. The difference was honestly not earth shattering - that is to say they were both extremely fast. I went with a Q9650 instead of a Q9550 because they are all guaranteed E0 and easier to overclock with the higher multiplier.

I also had a friend that upgraded a E6750 to a Q9550. He is using my old Gigabyte P35-DS3R. I was only able to get my Q6600 to 3.4Ghz on that board when I had it but with the Q9550 we were able to hit 4Ghz.

A useful question would be, what games do you play and do you find yourself in situations where you are CPU limited? For me the upgrade was worth it because the main game I play is World of Warcraft and you will pretty much always see an improvement in that game with a new processor.
 
possibly worth it

You like overclocking I guess? You can extend the life of that system with the upgrade. And you have the resale value of the Q6600.

The only negatives would be limited funds (which you don't seem to have since you brought this up) and maybe look into your motherboard chipset and see how it gets along with 45nm cpus. I'm guessing that Q6600 resale values will trend downwards while Q9550 will stay the same and maybe go up a little (if discontinued soon which I haven't read anything about).
 
Id say go for it, in fact i did this a while back, switched from a 3.8ghz q6600 to a q9550, 3.8ghz on it as well. It probably would have clocked even further but i sold it and got an i7 rig. The q9550 will run a lot cooler and clock a bit more.
 
I went from a 3.5ghz Q6600 in Vista 64 to my current 4ghz Q9550 and Windows 7 64. I cant feel that extra 500mhz per for at all. and I have a VM I use 24/7 for just internet browsing. as well as game, I'm running Utorrent all day Orb, and a ton of other apps all day long. I cant feel a difference. and if you ever raided 7200rpm 3.5 Hdd's you will be disappointed with OCZ and Intel single SSD drives.

I built two I7 920 Hacintoshs for my bro one with OCZ SSD the other with Intel. Obviously I had to use Windows to run Intel burn test, prime, and other tools to check stability for the overclocks and they didnt feel any different that my system, and in some cases felt a ton slower than Some WD RE drives in raid 0 when moving a bunch of 700mb files.
 
I would hold off for now. i7 is the future and sometime next year I hope to see 32nm 6core systems being built. It's not that the 9550 isn't faster, but that the Q6600 is not slow at all. It still has legs.
 
i went through this debate a while ago and held off. im still glad i did. i dont see any reason for this upgrade at all unless its like 30 bux.
 
No, and I really feel this question is asked enough to be stickied now. Still nobody would read it, but at least we could all yell, "STICKY!!!!"
 
There's absolutely no reason to perform this upgrade. If you do have money burning a hole in your pocket, go i5/i7.
 
It's not worth paying $200+ for an ~8% performance boost.

I upgraded from an Intel Core 2 Duo E4300 last month. My choice was a Q9400 for $200, or a brand new motherboard, DDR3 RAM, and a core i5/i7 processor. I went for the Q9400, overclocked it to 3.7 GHz which is very comparable and in several cases superior to the i7 920, and saved myself hundreds of dollars in the process.

Considering that Intel is jerking our chain with two different sockets this time around with 1156 and 1366, I'm not upgrading again until I know where the 6 and 8 core processors are going and if the motherboard I get can even handle it. Asus can go to hell.
 
Not worth it for anything. The only thing worth upgrading to from your current system would be an i7 setup.
 
Thank you for the responses and seems like "Don't Upgrade" vastly outnumbers the "Upgrade" option in the poll.
Simple reason for thinking of doing a Q6600 to a Q9550 was due to higher FSB, larger cache and smaller architecture which might be a little cooler to run even though I plan on OC'ing it if I did get a Q9550.
 
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