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Yorkfield 9550

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Eradan

[H]ard|Gawd
2FA
Joined
Apr 7, 2006
Messages
1,188
I have a Q9550 engineering sample gathering dust. I'm considering the purchase of an X38 board, faster RAM, and a CPU cooler to replace what you see in my sig. Given that gaming is the most intense computing activity I do, I wonder at this point if I'm not better off just putting that money towards an 8800GT. That would seem to offer the most increased performance where it I would appreciate it most. What would you do?

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What's really aggravating is that there's no place locally selling either of the recommended cards. Most of my computing life I have had to make difficult choices based on budget. I'm finally at a place where I can afford just about anything I want (although I still won't pay more than $400 for a video card) but what I want doesn't exist: Intel chipset with SLI support.

I might trade the Q9550 for the right GTX or Ultra although doing so could get me in trouble...

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One of the restrictions imposed when I took possession of the chip: do not sell, trade, give away, etc.

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no way in hell could i have a q9550 just sitting around not being used.

8800gt will definetely yield the biggest performance increase on games, but i'd consider getting a cheap and reliable p35 motherboard (doesnt look like you overclock so you can probably fine a decently priced mobo that'll suit you) so you can put that q9550 to good use. i would just reuse everything else, memory, cooler etc. seems like a e6600 heatsink should handle a yorkfield fine, and if it doesnt, you can pick up something fairly cheap that'll be adequate enough for stock clockrates
 
fluxion said:
no way in hell could i have a q9550 just sitting around not being used.

8800gt will definetely yield the biggest performance increase on games, but i'd consider getting a cheap and reliable p35 motherboard (doesnt look like you overclock so you can probably fine a decently priced mobo that'll suit you) so you can put that q9550 to good use. i would just reuse everything else, memory, cooler etc. seems like a e6600 heatsink should handle a yorkfield fine, and if it doesnt, you can pick up something fairly cheap that'll be adequate enough for stock clockrates
Click to expand...

At one point I was using the Intel 975 Bad Axe and ran my E6600 at ~3.2Ghz. I'm what I consider to be a moderate overclocker--I'll squeeze as much extra performance out as possible without messing with voltages and crazy cooling schemes. I'm a network engineer by trade and have years of experience as a hardware tech. I'm all worn out when it comes to a lot of extra fussing with my own rig. That's one reason I made the move back to Intel (free hardware notwithstanding). My last AMD Athlon 64 3800+ system is gathering dust. The AMD platform offered excellent price for performance but required a little more TLC to maintain than the Intel stuff.

Anyway, I can't OC with the board I have now. I plan to crank the 9550 to at least 9750 speeds if I get the right mobo. I can probably trade my existing 965OT board for an Asus P5B-E. Or I could pick up an Asus P5K. Either should allow me to use and OC the 9550 but I'm still stuck with the 1900XT for the time being (I should probably trying OCing it). I'm trying to find out how long the wait will be for the next gen Nvidia card (soon I hope). I'm probably going to have to wait for a new video card in any case due to availability of the new cards from either front and it irks me to pay inflated prices because demand is greater than the current supply.

I may pick up a new mobo today and see what this new chip is capable of. I've had it for almost a month and am dying to try it out.

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Just got home with the Asus P5B-E. Going to flash the BIOS with the latest beta and see what happens. I'll report back with results in case anyone gives a hoot.

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Finally got the Asus P5B-E BIOS flashed to 1706. EZFlash would not recognize any of my flash drive but was fine with my USB card reader and compact flash card. Took out my E6600, put in the Q9550 and the system POSTed without issue. I manually set the FSB to 1333. I haven't overclocked yet. Vista recovered nicely after the motherboard switch. I did use WinRAR to unpack a large ISO file this morning and it was noticeably faster than my E6600. More testing to do...

cpu_z.jpg



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