Core 2 Duo to Core 2 Quad - Worth it?

[Jedi2016]

Given the prices of the Core i-chips, I'm not looking to spend that much money at the moment. However, my current motherboard supports the Core 2 Quad chips as well as the Core 2 Duo that I have in there now.

What kind of improvement will I see just by going from Duo to Quad? Same clock (3.0GHz, stock), just going from E8400 to Q9650?

I'm sure my day-to-day functions probably won't benefit hugely, but my CGI rendering might (I'm asking on those boards too), but what about gaming? My GPU is far newer than everything else in the system (GTX465), and I have a feeling the bottleneck right now is the CPU.

Long story short, is it worth the $300+ to get the extra two cores?

 

[eastmen]

wtf $300 ? no its not worth $300

for $200 ish you can get a phenom II X6 1090T with mobo

http://www.microcenter.com/specials/promotions/AMDbundlePROMO.html

Some of the mobos might be compatible with future bulldozer chips and you should be able to get 8 gigs of ram for it for about $50-70 bucks . If you decide to go with a free mobo you can allways buy a full am3+ mobo when they come out in a few months and be ready for the full bulldozer experiance. Socket 754 is a dead end I wouldn't recommend buying a system. You can get the phenom x 6 for cheap and put in 8 gigs of ram (2x4) and when you need more ram get another (2x4) set of ram for 16 gigs and if you buy ddr 3 1866 now you can use it in a future bulldozer rig. You can even as I said use a free mobo and get the better ram and then when bulldozer hits just buy a am3+ mobo that way you have the ram and mobo for whenever your ready for your next upgrade . The am3+ socket should be good till at least 2013 . Socket 754 is as I said dead , even ddr2 is dead now so i wouldn't invest in more ram for it which could be holding you back with cgi rendering.

I think this is a way better upgrade than $300 for just a q9650


btw i got my q9650 for $180 bucks at microcenter 2 years ago now .


Oh and you can prob get $100 for your cpu mobo and ram

 

[suryad]

I don't believe it's worth it unless you actually go up architecturally meaning from a Core 2 Duo to the Sandy Bridge setup or something. Just going to quad core at the same architecture does not make much sense.

 

[swaaye]

It will still probably be 50-100% faster for CGI rendering because that should peg all cores. But hundreds of $$ is a lot for that upgrade. It's crazy how Intel can charge more for their older CPUs than AMD can charge for their latest greatest.

I would overhaul and go with a Sandy Bridge for sure though because that might be more like 200% faster.

BUT if you consider that with the Core 2 you are only replacing the CPU, the value might still be in that 775 setup.

 

[Davros]

are amd's latest and greatest faster than the old c2q's ?

 

[eastmen]

are amd's latest and greatest faster than the old c2q's ?

the phenom x6 at the price i listed with mobo is much faster for cgi type things providing your cgi software is able to use all 6 cores.

The phenom 2 generaly falls between the core 2 and new i5 chips in performance

 

[Davros]

Are they faster per core ?
would a x4 beat a c2q

 

[eastmen]

Are they faster per core ?
would a x4 beat a c2q

Depends on the benchmark but in general yes



http://www.anandtech.com/show/2923/3


Its hard to find direct comparisons most sites no longer use the quads



toms has charts where you can compare

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/...tml?prod[4437]=on&prod[4413]=on&prod[4428]=on

Phenom II x6 1090T vs Core 2 Quad 9650 vs Core 2 Duo E8400


The phenom II x6 is a good buy for its price range. At $150-$230 with mobo included it will bring him up to date with motherboards / ram and as intel and amd bring out more 6+ core cpus alot of performance just sitting there will come out .

Like i said if he can order from microcenter he can get a throw away board for free and upgrade to a am3+ board in a month or two. If he buys properly he will actually have a platform he can upgrade into and it wont cost much more than just a hop to a q9650 chip.


Phenom x 6 with free mobo as low as $169 . Figure 8 gigs of ddr 3 1866 is $120. So he is spending $290 on that upgrade. $10 less than what he was going to spend. In a few months or so a am 3+ mobo will be $60-$120 and he can pop the ram and cpu in there. A year further down the line he can pop in a bulldozer.


With socket 754 he is really stuck

 

[Davros]

jedi are you running at stock
perhaps buy a good cooler you can get an extra 50% out of that cpu iirc

 

[Jedi2016]

jedi are you running at stock
perhaps buy a good cooler you can get an extra 50% out of that cpu iirc

I was waiting for that to come up.. lol. Yeah, I never really gave much thought to overclocking. I do have a good cooler, but I bought it mainly for low noise rather than being able to cool above and beyond normal use.

I also didn't realize the huge disparity in chip prices.. a quick glance at some of the top-end i7 chips (around $1000 on Newegg) made me think the $300 C2Q was about right... but I spent a few more minutes and saw that I really could buy a i5 and a new motherboard to run it for less than that single Core 2 Quad. Crazy.

It might not be something I do right away.. I'm not sure just how CPU-limited I really am at the moment, since I don't do a huge amount of high-end gaming, but I think I know which way I'll be leaning when it comes time to spend the money (gut the mobo).

 

[swaaye]

Maybe just wait for Ivy Bridge and Bulldozer. That's what I'm doing.

 

[Otto Dafe]

For games I still think single core performance is crucial, meaning new architecture would be better. If you look at Lynnfield vs. the 900 i7s it's written plain as day. For rendering, what about springing for a new MB, mem, processor, and setting up the old rig to batch render. Offline rendering is, after all, embarrassingly parallelizable, and since it's all SW you can always shift your parts back, and eventually have a small rendering farm.