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Upgrade CPU or wait?

W

Weenis

I said WEENIS, not...
Joined
Apr 10, 2006
Messages
4,807
I'm on the brim of wanting to just upgrade right now but here is my situation:

Rig in the Sig..
e6400 not OC'd
nvidia 260 core 216 w/ 896mb of ram
4gb DDR2
Main drive is a 120gb WD w/ 8mb of cache

I dropped in the 260 216 to replace an 8800GTS 320, just never touched anything else.

I'm wondering if it's worth while for me to jump to a new i7 930?

Or if my cpu is not pushing my video card hard enough; Here is the kicker though

There's a good chance in about 8 months that I'll end up in military training for about 6-9 months straight. So I don't want to jump to the i7 and then it not be fully utilized then stagnate while I'm in training.

However, if I could just drop in a new CPU and see a good performance jump that might be a reasonable option too.

Any other ideas please let me know what you guys think

Thanks in advance :)
 
Build the machine you want, have a blast with it, and then sell/part it out a month before you leave. Buy used parts and shell shocker deals that way you'll pretty much keep most of your original investment. Plus if you are gone for 6-9 months anyway I would want my stuff sold asap while it has it's higher value, then buy newer tech again when you get back or are ready to build another down the road.

That's my input ;)
 
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in your situation i would just look for a used quad and upgrade the full system when you get back from training.
 
Why not overclock you CPU first? It's basically a free "upgrade", if that's not cutting it for you time to upgrade.
 
|Tch0rT| said:
Why not overclock you CPU first? It's basically a free "upgrade", if that's not cutting it for you time to upgrade.
Click to expand...

Hmm I might try the cpu upgrade but.. overclocking is never something I've done a whole lot of. That and I'm not sure what the e6400 is capable of on stock cooling?
 
I'd get a quad core. A Q6600 will work. A Q9550 won't with the 680i.
 
I would either OC your processor now or get a Q6600 if the Q9550 won't work with your mobo.

I say you should just OC your processor and when you get back you can do the upgrade you want.
 
Weenis said:
Hmm I might try the cpu upgrade but.. overclocking is never something I've done a whole lot of. That and I'm not sure what the e6400 is capable of on stock cooling?
Click to expand...

Well, I would suggest getting a better heatsink before you do anything else. Better cooling never hurt anything. Once you have a better heatsink you could overclock your e6400 for a good performance boost. I used a $25 heatsink on my dad's e6300 and I was able to take it to from 1.86GHz to 2.8GHz without a problem. You can get any overclocking help that you need right here. Plus, if you get a good heatsink you can use it if you decide to upgrade to a quad core cpu, or build a whole new rig.

If you want some heatsink suggestions, check out something like the Cogage TRUE Spirit, or the Cooler Master Hyper 212+. You can get the Cogage from svc.com for $35 +shipping.

Core 2 Duo and Quad overclocking guide:
http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1198647&highlight=intel+overclocking+guide
 
Thanks guys I really appreciate all the advice, I love this community :)
 
Weenis said:
Hmm I might try the cpu upgrade but.. overclocking is never something I've done a whole lot of. That and I'm not sure what the e6400 is capable of on stock cooling?
Click to expand...

Stock cooling won't kill you as long as you watch your temps and don't change the voltage too much. you can probably get a couple hundred mhz bump without changing anything other than bios settings.
 
I pretty much had the same dilemma :D go for the Quad!

Upgraded my e5300 since I couldn't pass up a Q9550 for ~$170
and it definitely feels like the new cpu is breathing new life into everything I do.

+the money I didn't spend for a new and expensive platform upgrade can go into other things...
 
I would be surprised if you couldn't get another 400mhz or so out of the stock heatsink, especially if you don't need to bump the voltage up to do it as long as it's not running hot to begin with. I had my E6400 running 3.4Ghz with an old Koolance EXOS which was outperformed by the TRUE 120. Before I got the socket 775 waterblock I was running the stock heatsink with the CPU@3.2Ghz. This was the winter and my apartment was rather cold meaning low ambient temps. I believe I was able to do 2.8 or so stably with stock voltages.

Besides that, I would get a new hard drive. A modern hard drive would probably make a huge difference in your day to day tasks. I had that exact same or similar hard drive with openSUSE installed on it in my server and what little hands on stuff I did on the server was painful. I now have a two year old 500 gig Seagate as the OS drive and it makes a hell of a difference even though it's one of my slower SATA drives.

 
I'll have to look into doing the overclock on the stock cooler and then bump to a Q6600 or Q9550 with an aftermarket cooler.

It's pretty cool in the apartment I live in and I typically leave the side of the case off, but I do live in Dallas.. so it never goes below 73ish and never above 75 in here.

What I'm concerned about though is someone said a q9550 won't work in a 680i EVGA board?

I only scantly looked into OC'ing years and years ago, but if I recall correctly messing with voltage is sketchy sometimes?

I definitely need to replace the main drive. I love that 120 as it is the first hard drive I bought like 8 or so years ago. I checked the SMART data and it has 25,417 hours of powered up time on it.. :)
 
Q9550 won't work...you need a 780 board. 45nm dual cores will work...just not the quads. Messing with voltages isn't really sketchy. You just bump it a little at a time and check your temps with your OC. You should try without bumping voltage first.
 
When overclocking, don't even touch the voltage until you have found instability with the speed you are currently running at. At that point you make a one step increase to see if the additional voltage stabilized the overclock. Either that or drop the overclock down a bit to see if you regain stability. It's been a couple years since I got rid of my E6400 but I'm pretty sure you should be able to get to 2.8 on stock voltage. I do need to add that when I overclocked my E6400 I was using an Intel P965 chipset. I've never owned a 680i chipset board but from what I remember they did a good job overclocking dual cores, just not that good with quads. Then again, the P965 chipset boards were somewhat similar.
 
I'm going to have to go with save up for the i7 since your current mobo won't work with the Q9550.
 
fullvietFX said:
I'm going to have to go with save up for the i7 since your current mobo won't work with the Q9550.
Click to expand...

The Q6600 isn't a bad alternative, especially since it is $50+ cheaper. I see them go for $125 used in the forum all the time.
 
Seems like the Q6600 is no longer available to be purchased new though :(
 
Weenis said:
Seems like the Q6600 is no longer available to be purchased new though :(
Click to expand...

Used CPU's aren't bad, especially ones without pins ;). I can see being leary of a motherboard, but I've never had a problem with a used CPU. I'm sure there are new ones on Ebay if you need a new one.
 
Weenis said:
Hmm I might try the cpu upgrade but.. overclocking is never something I've done a whole lot of. That and I'm not sure what the e6400 is capable of on stock cooling?
Click to expand...

You should have no problems running 3 ghz on stock cooling. Long as you don't raise voltage it should be fine.
 
MrXROK said:
You should have no problems running 3 ghz on stock cooling. Long as you don't raise voltage it should be fine.
Click to expand...

I'm working on bumping it up. I have it up at 2.4ghz now. Slowly working my way up :)
 
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