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Worthy Upgrade from E8400

Z

zod96

Suspected BAD TRADER
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Feb 23, 2008
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I was testing the waters and wondering if upgrading my Intel E8400 to a Intel I5 750 would be worth it? I'm gamer and getting a new 5870 Ati card monday. And was thinking maybe the E8400 would bottleneck the 5870. But I'm not sure if the I5 is that much faster than a E8400. I know the I5 is 2.6 and the E8400 is 3.0. I really don't want to goto I7 that's a bit too much, the I5 seems much more affordable, just not sure if its worth it....
 
I doubt you'll see much increase, unless the games you play utilize more than 2 cores.
Especially if you're not OCing.
Buying a new mobo + RAM just for that seems not worthy imo.

You should try OCing that E8400
 
If your cooling can handle it, I'd suggest overclocking the E8400 before upgrading. That'd squeeze some extra life out of it for your use. Although even before that, see for yourself whether or not it seems things don't run smooth enough with the new GPU.
 
i went from an e8400 @ 3.8 to a q6700 that can do the same speed, at the same speed the q6700 was at worst equal to and usually better than... i'd look to a good overclocking quad before you put money into a whole new platform
 
zod96 said:
I was testing the waters and wondering if upgrading my Intel E8400 to a Intel I5 750 would be worth it? I'm gamer and getting a new 5870 Ati card monday. And was thinking maybe the E8400 would bottleneck the 5870. But I'm not sure if the I5 is that much faster than a E8400. I know the I5 is 2.6 and the E8400 is 3.0. I really don't want to goto I7 that's a bit too much, the I5 seems much more affordable, just not sure if its worth it....
Click to expand...

You don't need a new processor.
 
$159.99 Microcenter Intel Q9550 E0 is a worthy upgrade for your system.

Either that or look for a used Q9550 E0 for less money. Great CPU.
 
next-Jin said:
If you can pick it up for cheap it would be worth it imo.
Click to expand...

OP has a P5Q Pro.

If anything he should grab the Q9550. Now that is worth it than the old q6600.

Other than that... unless the q6600 is $80 or below... not a real worthy upgrade from an e8400.
 
he still has to consider OCing for either of those quads to be an 'upgrade'
Otherwise you're losing raw clockspeed.
 
well he also has a 26" panel, so he'll probably game at 2560x1600. most likely he will be gpu limited at that res. if he runs into cpu bottleneck, a mild overclock should take care of it. no upgrade needed imo.
 
Is there such an LCD? 26" at 2560x1600? I thought we had to go 30" for that.
 
Actually my resolution is 1920x1200 on this 26 inch. Man those I7 are not cheap. I priced out a !7 and its about $600 for the I7 860, a P55 MB and 4 gb of good ram.. I don't think that setup will yield that big a difference from my setup now...
 
Forget I7, get the barely noticeably slower I5. CPU + Mobo = $400 but I'm with the people that say get a $150 C2Q on your mobo and just OC it to 3ghz +.

When I went from a 4.3ghz E8400 to a PII unlocked to a quad but not OC'd my FPS did go down but not much and my multi threaded app performance went way up. Went from encoding a movie in about an hour to a little over 30 mins for the same type/size project :) Not to mention my archiving time got a bit better.

If all you do is game on your PC or if you don't care about other application performance then OC your E8400, otherwise get a Q6600 or Q9950 and OC it but even at stock pretty much everything outside of games will get a nice speed boost.

My next build will be from the ground up as I'm currently on either a T42 laptop or Aopen MP915B media box and I'll prob be building a Core I5 machine when that time comes. You get near I7 performance without the I7 price. A buddy of mine just went from an aging AM2 machine to an $1100 Core I5 build and that thing fn screams. We've only tinkered with it a bit but with a $30 standard heatpipe tower the thing is at 3.7ghz atm and that was with little tweaking.
 
I'm going to stick with my E8400. I saw some benchmarks in games and in some the E8400 actually beats the I7 or I5. Actually it was the E8600 but my E8400 is overclocked to 3.2 anyway. And most of my system is for gaming that's it, no Microsoft office style stuff.
 
zod96 said:
I'm going to stick with my E8400. I saw some benchmarks in games and in some the E8400 actually beats the I7 or I5. Actually it was the E8600 but my E8400 is overclocked to 3.2 anyway. And most of my system is for gaming that's it, no Microsoft office style stuff.
Click to expand...

e8400's - even C0's should hit 4Ghz easily. Considering you are on a P45, quad-core OCing should be a cinch on that board (even with a 8.5x multi), if you want to go up to a Q9550.
 
if you are not overclocking, you will not be going up to a q9550, will be going over, or maybe down. 12mb l2 cache wont do jack shit for a game.
 
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