Q9650 @ 4.4Ghz vs. i5-2500K @ 5Ghz

[GotNoRice]

I just did a CPU/motherboard/memory upgrade today and thought I'd share my results.

I went from a Gigabyte EP45-UD3P with a Q9650 @ 4.4Ghz to an ASUS P8Z68-V with an i5-2500K @ 5Ghz.

3dmark Vantage:
Before:

After:

3dmark06:
Before:

After:

Unigine Heaven:
BEFORE
AFTER


SuperPi:
Before:

After:

I'm pretty happy so far. Although I never really felt limited by my Q9650 before, this seems like a bigger upgrade than when I went from my Q6600 @ 3.6 to the Q9650 @ 4.4.

 

[BurntToast]

Did you do anything besides synthetic benchmarking?

 

[exdriver]

Grats. Enjoy

Welcome to the waiting for the next step. What's your impression of the ASUS board?

 

[GotNoRice]

Did you do anything besides synthetic benchmarking?

I played a few games and they certainly felt faster. Most of the games I care about are pretty CPU focused, such as World of Warcraft, BFBC2, GTA4, and Supreme Commander 2. I don't know how to do benchmarks in any of those games though.

What's your impression of the ASUS board?

Seems nice so far. I like the easy overclocking. I like that it actually has Intel gigabit and not some POS realtek. One weird thing however is that from a cold boot it always seems to sit there with the fans on for like 15 seconds before it posts most of the time, but after that it works great.

 

[exdriver]

My impression on the games end was a more fluid response rather than overall raw speed and that is not only hard to measure but a most welcome change. Would you say that's accurate?

I think ASUS has a winner with the easy overclock, and I've had no trouble out of the current realtek lan, but I'll admit that I have an Intel card I can drop in if it fails

realtek sound on the other hand leaves something to be desired.

 

[munkle]

Seems nice so far. I like the easy overclocking. I like that it actually has Intel gigabit and not some POS realtek. One weird thing however is that from a cold boot it always seems to sit there with the fans on for like 15 seconds before it posts most of the time, but after that it works great.

I went with the asus maxiums gene-z for that reason, it seems like all the asus p3p6xxx boards have some weird boot issue. My gene-z boots fine, although it takes longer that the boot screen than my old asus am3 mobo.

 

[RamonGTP]

Shocking results. A newer faster processor that's OC'd higher is faster than an older, slower one with lower clock speeds.

 

[exdriver]

Shocking results. A newer faster processor that's OC'd higher is faster than an older, slower one with lower clock speeds.

lqtm, it's like that huh?

 

[GotNoRice]

Shocking results. A newer faster processor that's OC'd higher is faster than an older, slower one with lower clock speeds.

Shocking post. A user clinging to his old C2Q rig gets butt-hurt at the mention of new technology.

People with Core 2 rigs thinking about upgrading comprise a large number of posts in this section. The info is obviously relevant.

 

[uunut]

So.... Sell me that slow pos q9650?

oh yeah...

 

[Decko87]

Link/images are broken for me, would like to see results!

 

[spine]

I think this post goes to show just how much influence the cpu has on game performance.

Many people, even in these forums, swear blind anything over a 3.6ghz Core2Quad is overkill and easily handles modern cards. That's total bull.

I've just done a similar upgrade infact; Q6700 @ 3.8ghz to 2600K @ 5ghz and the improvement is breath taking. Everything is so much smoother (mainly due to the on-die IMC) and raw game performance is noticably improved. I can run all my games at higher settings and higher framerates. The improvement is very easily beyond-benchmark obvious.

 

[Mad Lion]

I'd be curious to see the Core2 Quad compared to the Sandy Bridge @ 4.4ghz.

Let's do clock for clock, shall we?

 

[AliceCooper]

Damn thats a pretty good leap for a CPU upgrade. I'm still happy with my C2D though gets the job done.

 

[ziggo0]

Going from my q9550 @ 4.4 to a stock i7 870 was like night and day, now the i7 is at 4.2 and it's even better.

 

[exdriver]

Many people, even in these forums, swear blind anything over a 3.6ghz Core2Quad is overkill and easily handles modern cards.

It's not total bull. A system with a C2Q and a nice modern card isn't that bad, and I do think anyone in that position could wait until next year to upgrade if they wanted to. If you only buy once every five years that might even be the smartest choice. You could (hopefully) get into a mature 6 or 8 core system next year that may very well last you a long time.

OTOH - to say there is no difference... well, you keep thinking that, lol. Yes there is.

 

[Mystic-Micro]

I know its harder to run, but can you actually a play a level in bad company 2 like [H]'s review does (same level, same gfx settings, use fraps) Synthetic benchmarks are just drivel really and then compare your results to what they have...because my core2quad at 3.4 gets very close to their reference set-up... I am sure there's a difference, but I doubt it will warrant a whole platform change from a gaming perspective anyway.

 

[spine]

I have to admit, I only recently upgraded to i7 because I destroyed my C2Q motherboard through over-zealous watercooling modifcations.

If I hadn't had done that, I wouldn't have upgraded.

But now that I have, the improvement is more than noticable and am I'm grateful for the 'forced' upgrade!

 

[BababooeyHTJ]

Thanks for posting your results.

Shocking results. A newer faster processor that's OC'd higher is faster than an older, slower one with lower clock speeds.

There is no need to be a prick. It is nice to see somebody contributing their actual results for other people with a similar system to see. There are a lot of people out there that for some reason think that the Q9650 is much faster than it really is. Just look at the improvement in the gpu score in that vantage bench with a 4870x2. I found that to be interesting.

 

[Coaxial]

Nice results, as others have requested, I think you should post the same results with the 2500k at 4.4ghz as well so we get a straight up comparison. Also on your Heaven benchmark your minimum fps was a lot lower with the 2500k, might want to run it again to see if it was just a fluke

 

[BababooeyHTJ]

Nice results, as others have requested, I think you should post the same results with the 2500k at 4.4ghz as well so we get a straight up comparison. Also on your Heaven benchmark your minimum fps was a lot lower with the 2500k, might want to run it again to see if it was just a fluke

Why does clock for clock results matter? 4.4ghz is a very heavy overclock for a Q9650. As is thats something that you would never be able to hit on air. The fact of the matter is that sandy clocks higher. Max oc vs max oc it the much more interesting comparison imo.

 

[Eradan]

Thank you for taking the time to post this. I stood in Microcenter for over an hour today looking at the 2500k (which is $150 right now) and Asus motherboards. Ultimately I walked out with nothing because I haven't been able to convince myself that I will be able to actually tell a difference in day-to-day use. Will research the forum more tonight and maybe head back to Microcenter tomorrow.

How are you cooling your new CPU?

Thanks again.

E

 

[DJ_007]

it would seem to me it had to be hard to justify the money for what i consider a small performance gain.. was expecting the I5 at that speed to crush the 9650

 

[Idef1x]

it would seem to me it had to be hard to justify the money for what i consider a small performance gain.. was expecting the I5 at that speed to crush the 9650

I see we have very different opinions on the term "crushing". I personally thought that was a tremendous performance gain. Especially the GPU scores show how CPU bound he was prior to upgrading.

 

[BababooeyHTJ]

Its just a few canned benchmarks. They aren't exactly representative of real world usage.

 

[DualOwn]

UNIGINE HEAVEN:


Min FPS: 32.5fps with 2500k

Min Fps: 49fps with 9650


what the hell?


but after all said and done, you are using a wrong video card to show the difference between 2 cpu's.

if you used a gtx590/6990 or even a single gtx580 the results would will be much differerent between the 2 cpu's.

 

[UnrealCpu]

UNIGINE HEAVEN:


Min FPS: 32.5fps with 2500k

Min Fps: 49fps with 9650


what the hell?


but after all said and done, you are using a wrong video card to show the difference between 2 cpu's.

if you used a gtx590/6990 or even a single gtx580 the results would will be much differerent between the 2 cpu's.

LOL totally agree., The orginal poster posted his famous remarks how much his Wow improved and i was like your vid card ati 4870 is comparable to a 8800 GT , which is slow as balls.. I told him he should of just upgraded his video card gto GTX 570 or 6970 whatever . I am happy at 1920x1200 GTX 570 CPU is a 9550 at 3.61 all year round. Sandy is a waste of cash until it drops significantly or something better comes out which it will by Jan 2012 , you will see Sandy-E and Bulldozer beat the i2600k even when overclocked on air.

My experience is over 12 years overclocking and had a phase change cooler. Im on air right now.. I dont care.. Everything is GPU limited. Except Battle Field 3 and few others. Maybe they need to code better idk.. I have over 400 games on steam which run great at 1920x1200.. I could see ya you need a sandy cpu for 2500x1200 or whatever resolutions lol or you want to brag that you can encode a file a min or two faster woopie doo. 99 percent of the people out there dont run more than 60hz on a LCD or FPS unless you are a sony CRT fan and like run FPS games at 120-180HZ which equates to 120 FPS-180..
Also i guess if you wanted to run 16gb of ram in your DDR3 system thats a plus. But i have 8gb and everything runs great i dont get it..

Core 2 quad users if you are running less than 3.2 gighertz and a crappy video card , yes its worth it to upgrade to a slow Core I5 and another crappy video card. for 300-400 bucks. When i upgrade i am getting something better than the 2600k and 16+gb ram and asus mobo. My Gtx 570 will love me for BF3

Sandy-E or Bulldozer is in my future

 

[UnrealCpu]

Thank you for taking the time to post this. I stood in Microcenter for over an hour today looking at the 2500k (which is $150 right now) and Asus motherboards. Ultimately I walked out with nothing because I haven't been able to convince myself that I will be able to actually tell a difference in day-to-day use. Will research the forum more tonight and maybe head back to Microcenter tomorrow.

How are you cooling your new CPU?

Thanks again.

E

better off getting a better video card and waiting.
Overclock your cpu to 3.3+ if you can

maybe invest 30-40 dollars on a better heatsink idk. Ram, mobo , cooling is what keeps that 9550 from overclocking.> If you get the 2500k you can be sure to overclock easy with crap mobo and ram and cooling. Just get a better video card and put your hard earned money into a bulldozer or sandy-E in JAN 2012. Or better yet im sure the i2600k will be 150-199 dollars by then on sale. Sandy-E and BD will drop the prices alot.

 

[GotNoRice]

Its just a few canned benchmarks. They aren't exactly representative of real world usage.

It was never supposed to be a comprehensive review, just a few quick benchmarks I ran after the upgrade.

UNIGINE HEAVEN:


Min FPS: 32.5fps with 2500k

Min Fps: 49fps with 9650


what the hell?

The minimum FPS value is a single figure and not representative of performance during game-play (meaning just because it dipped that low once doesn't mean it did with any degree of regularity). Typically with crossfire there will be a brief pause at the very beginning as initial synchronization occurs and in many cases this can produce an unusually low min-FPS value. The only way to produce min-FPS numbers that are useful is in a graph form similar to how HardOCP does it. Without that you have no way of knowing if it hit that min-FPS value once or 100 times during the benchmark.

but after all said and done, you are using a wrong video card to show the difference between 2 cpu's.

I used the GPUs I have because that is what I own. Again, this wasn't meant as a comprehensive review, just some benchmarks I ran on my system.

if you used a gtx590/6990 or even a single gtx580 the results would will be much differerent between the 2 cpu's.

I think you missed the part where I'm running not one 4870 GPU but 4 of them.

LOL totally agree., The orginal poster posted his famous remarks how much his Wow improved and i was like your vid card ati 4870 is comparable to a 8800 GT , which is slow as balls..

World of Warcraft did benefit greatly from the CPU upgrade. World of Warcraft still does the majority of it's processing in a single thread. There are several additional threads but they primarily handle model loading. The result is that for WoW IPC is king and you benefit little past 2 cores. You can see from the SuperPi results that the IPC of the i5-2500k is night and day compared to the Q9650. And my 2x 4870x2 certainly isn't slow or limiting anything in WoW. World of Warcraft makes excellent use of quad crossfire. Also, a 4870 is more along the lines of a GTX260 than an 8800GT.

My 2x 4870x2 gives more performance than the GTX480 in your rig, since we're talking about "slow" cards

I told him he should of just upgraded his video card gto GTX 570 or 6970 whatever . I am happy at 1920x1200 GTX 570 CPU is a 9550 at 3.61 all year round. Sandy is a waste of cash until it drops significantly or something better comes out which it will by Jan 2012 , you will see Sandy-E and Bulldozer beat the i2600k even when overclocked on air.

Ah, so now the real reason for your snarky posts is revealed - another butthurt C2Q user.

My experience is over 12 years overclocking and had a phase change cooler.

Cool story bro?

Everything is GPU limited. Except Battle Field 3 and few others. Maybe they need to code better idk.. I have over 400 games on steam which run great at 1920x1200.. I could see ya you need a sandy cpu for 2500x1200 or whatever resolutions

So your "12 years experience" has taught you that BF3 isn't GPU limited (even though it's probably one of the most GPU limited games currently available) and that CPUs benefit more at higher resolutions (when in-fact the opposite is generally the case). Sounds like you really don't have any idea what you're talking about.

lol or you want to brag that you can encode a file a min or two faster woopie doo.

None of my benchmarks had anything to do with, nor did I ever mention anything about encoding. It sounds like you have an axe to grind that has nothing to do with my thread, but thanks for junking it up anyway.

99 percent of the people out there dont run more than 60hz on a LCD or FPS unless you are a sony CRT fan and like run FPS games at 120-180HZ which equates to 120 FPS-180..

I'm not even sure what you're really trying to say or what your point is here.

Also i guess if you wanted to run 16gb of ram in your DDR3 system thats a plus. But i have 8gb and everything runs great i dont get it..

Who in this thread said anything about ram? I have 8GB too. 32-bit programs (all current games basically) are limited to 4GB ram and even then only if it is Large Address Aware.

Core 2 quad users if you are running less than 3.2 gighertz and a crappy video card , yes its worth it to upgrade to a slow Core I5 and another crappy video card. for 300-400 bucks. When i upgrade i am getting something better than the 2600k and 16+gb ram and asus mobo. My Gtx 570 will love me for BF3

Do you realize that the i5-2500k and the i7-2600k perform exactly the same in games when at the same clocks? In fact, due to the slight reduction in overhead from not having HT, the i5 often performs several FPS faster.

 

[BababooeyHTJ]

It was never supposed to be a comprehensive review, just a few quick benchmarks I ran after the upgrade.

I understand that and it is nice to see. That response was more for people trying to make more out of the comparison than they should.

I wouldn't even bother responding to that last guy and his incoherent ramblings. The fact of the matter is that sandybridge is a nice upgrade from core 2 quad and it shows in quite a few games but there is no way that he would know.

 

[RamonGTP]

you will see Sandy-E and Bulldozer beat the i2600k even when overclocked on air.

BD won't touch the 2600k in anything excpet MAYBE handbrake encoding. Not to mention, there are a whole lot of games that can easily be CPU limited today.

 

[DualOwn]

I think you missed the part where I'm running not one 4870 GPU but 4 of them

i guess that after all these years you never got the memo how unreliable 4870x2 crossfire was for benchmarks/games.

you are barely seeing 3rd and maybe nothing from the 4th gpu in action from the 4000 series.

barrow a 590/6990 or 3x580's/6970's from somebody and do the similar test so you can see the correct numbers between the 2 cpu's.

and btw, there is something off in 3dmark Vantage that you posted between the "before" and "after", in Feature Test 1.

it appears that you have more gpu power in the c2q setup.

3274 Gtexels/s (c2q) vs 105 Gtexels/s (i5)

explain this anomoly?

 

[Grrag275]

i guess that after all these years you never got the memo how unreliable 4870x2 crossfire was for benchmarks/games.

you are barely seeing 3rd and maybe nothing from the 4th gpu in action from the 4000 series.

barrow a 590/6990 or 3x580's/6970's from somebody and do the similar test so you can see the correct numbers between the 2 cpu's.

and btw, there is something off in 3dmark Vantage that you posted between the "before" and "after", in Feature Test 1.

it appears that you have more gpu power in the c2q setup.

3274 Gtexels/s (c2q) vs 105 Gtexels/s (i5)

explain this anomoly?

Why dont you go borrow a CPU or 2 and do some testing of your own?
The guy just posted some bench results with the hardware he owns? He didnt make any claims or is forcing anyone to go buy a 2500K because its so much better than anything else... why is everyone on his back?

 

[BababooeyHTJ]

Why dont you go borrow a CPU or 2 and do some testing of your own?
The guy just posted some bench results with the hardware he owns and everyone is on his back? He didnt make any claims or is forcing anyone to go buy a 2500K because its so much better than anything else... why is everyone on his back?

That guy has been being a jerk in several threads. Just report his post like I did.

 

[UnrealCpu]

It was never supposed to be a comprehensive review, just a few quick benchmarks I ran after the upgrade.



The minimum FPS value is a single figure and not representative of performance during game-play (meaning just because it dipped that low once doesn't mean it did with any degree of regularity). Typically with crossfire there will be a brief pause at the very beginning as initial synchronization occurs and in many cases this can produce an unusually low min-FPS value. The only way to produce min-FPS numbers that are useful is in a graph form similar to how HardOCP does it. Without that you have no way of knowing if it hit that min-FPS value once or 100 times during the benchmark.



I used the GPUs I have because that is what I own. Again, this wasn't meant as a comprehensive review, just some benchmarks I ran on my system.



I think you missed the part where I'm running not one 4870 GPU but 4 of them.



World of Warcraft did benefit greatly from the CPU upgrade. World of Warcraft still does the majority of it's processing in a single thread. There are several additional threads but they primarily handle model loading. The result is that for WoW IPC is king and you benefit little past 2 cores. You can see from the SuperPi results that the IPC of the i5-2500k is night and day compared to the Q9650. And my 2x 4870x2 certainly isn't slow or limiting anything in WoW. World of Warcraft makes excellent use of quad crossfire. Also, a 4870 is more along the lines of a GTX260 than an 8800GT.

My 2x 4870x2 gives more performance than the GTX480 in your rig, since we're talking about "slow" cards


I have a GTX 570

I am still not convinced to upgrade .. Waste of money until it comes down in price or Sandy-E or Bulldozer arrive.

 

[BababooeyHTJ]

I am still not convinced to upgrade .. Waste of money until it comes down in price or Sandy-E or Bulldozer arrive.

Good for you.

Neither solution will be faster than a 2500k for gaming btw.

 

[UnrealCpu]

That guy has been being a jerk in several threads. Just report his post like I did.

So now you revert to name calling? I think ill report you now.

I have made my personal opinion just like everyone else has.. Obviously you cannot take other peoples comments and experiences with different setups.

I have agreed that yes i2500k and i2600k is alittle bit faster but not a big difference between my setup and yours and for me to upgrade would be a waste of cash. Ill wait.

There is several other users in this same post who have posted comments about this thread and how its still not worth to upgrade. So do not single me out

 

[BababooeyHTJ]

I have agreed that yes i2500k and i2600k is alittle bit faster but not a big difference between my setup and yours and for me to upgrade would be a waste of cash. Ill wait.

Well, in some games there actually would be a big difference. In some others none.

 

[DualOwn]

Why dont you go borrow a CPU or 2 and do some testing of your own?
The guy just posted some bench results with the hardware he owns? He didnt make any claims or is forcing anyone to go buy a 2500K because its so much better than anything else... why is everyone on his back?

you are perceiving this thread on a different note, nobody is saying anything in the way that you are claiming.

we are just talking, i guess forums were build for that purpose, right?

 

[UnrealCpu]

you are perceiving this thread on a different note, nobody is saying anything in the way that you are claiming.

we are just talking, i guess forums were build for that purpose, right?

Sure thing buddy.