Question Battle of the ancient CPUs - AMD X4 635 2.90Ghz vs Intel Q9400 2.66 Ghz

[KeithP]

Without making a long boring post, other things being equal, which of these two CPUs perform better. Or maybe I should put it…perform less badly?

The AMD X4 635 2.90Ghz or the Intel Q9400 2.66 Ghz? This would be running Windows 10.
The benchmarks I have found online suggest the AMD system should be slightly better but they are relatively close in performance. Does that sound right?

Spoiler: Boring details if you are interested…

I have an old HP AMD X4 system that I recently installed Windows 10 on in preparation for donating to someone or some organization. The system has 8GB of RAM and a 250GB SSD and performs rather well, given its age, for simple web browsing. However, I just found out my sister is still using her old Dell 518 (Q9400 2.66 GHz) running Windows 7, 4GB of RAM, 500GB HD.

While my sister does occasionally use her system, most of the time she uses her iPad or iPhone. I was thinking, even though she rarely uses her computer, she would be better off with my old HP. Of course, the RAM and SSD give it an advantage but I could transfer the SSD to her system and dig up some old RAM for the Dell if that would be a better platform than the AMD X4.

Thanks,
KeithP

 

[SPBHM]

as a CPU the C2Q is better without a doubt, but I would also consider the motherboard/ram for the decision.

 

[bigboxes]

If they are even close to each other performance-wise, I'd just leave things alone and let your sister keep her current setup. There's just not a lot of value left at this point. Cannibalize what you can and donate the old box .

 

[KeithP]

as a CPU the C2Q is better without a doubt, but I would also consider the motherboard/ram for the decision.

Motherboard-wise, neither are much good (most likely). One is a Dell system the other is an HP and they are both running with their original OEM motherboards. I inspected the HP's motherboard recently and didn't see any swollen or leaky caps. I haven't see the Dell's motherboard.

From what I can tell the Dell is running DDR2 800MHz (based on original order email) and the HP is using PC3-10600 DDR3.

-KeithP

 

[NTMBK]

Got to agree- the disruption isn't worth the minor improvement. If you were moving her up to something like Haswell, maybe... But she won't notice any difference here.

 

[ehume]

See if you can still upgrade a Win7 system to Win-10 for free. Doing this to your sister's rig would make it hack-resistant. That is the only change I would make to the 2 systems.

 

[SPBHM]

I've done a windows 7 to 10 upgrade like when it was supported a few weeks ago and it still worked the same!

but windows 10 might feel slower than 7 with these kinds of PC

 

[ehume]

I've done a windows 7 to 10 upgrade like when it was supported a few weeks ago and it still worked the same!

but windows 10 might feel slower than 7 with these kinds of PC

I think they use comparable resources. You have gone from Win 7 to 10 on an old system. What was your experience?

 

[Spjut]

There are already a few games that the Core 2 Quad 8000/9000 CPUs can run but the Phenom/Athlon II CPUs can't due to missing the SSE4 instruction set. Then there's the question how well the old Core 2 Quad will run them anyway though.

I've used Windows 10 on various old PCs and never noticed it feeling any slower than Windows 7. The one exception I constantly see people mentioning though is for the old Intel IGP,s, everyone with older than Sandy Bridge IGP says it's super slow. Also seen a few mentions here and there of the old ATI DX9 Vista drivers being slow on Win10.

I didn't feel Win10 being slower than Win7 on a Geforce 6200 either, though I didn't do any other tests than browsing a bit to see if it was functional.

 

[KeithP]

See if you can still upgrade a Win7 system to Win-10 for free. Doing this to your sister's rig would make it hack-resistant. That is the only change I would make to the 2 systems.

I know that still works, at least when installing from scratch because I did that with the HP. Just created an install disc and used the HP's original Windows serial number and it activated fine.

I appreciate the feedback everyone. Thank you!

-KeithP

 

[SPBHM]

I think they use comparable resources. You have gone from Win 7 to 10 on an old system. What was your experience?

from my experience windows 10 likes doing more stuff on the background and seems to dislike the slow hard drive more, but it's subjective, I've updated an lga775 from 7 to 10 last year (preparing for the end of support) and had that impression,
also if you are using old IGPs with WDDM 1.0 drivers (GMA 950, GMA 3100) there is a very noticeable drop in UI performance and increase in CPU usage by the windows desktop manager when migrating to windows 10.

 

[Thibsie]

I think they use comparable resources. You have gone from Win 7 to 10 on an old system. What was your experience?

Last win10 releases are hard on older hardware IMO. If still using hard drive and worse, less than 8 GB of RAM (or 4GB but then 32bit Win), it will feel quite slow.

 

[BigDaveX]

The 635 model number means it's actually an Athlon II rather than a Phenom II, and thus lacks any L3 cache. While there are signs that K10 has held up better in certain modern scenarios than the Conroe or Penryn cores, there's just no way on Earth that the Athlon II is going to be able to overcome only having 512KB of cache available per core, compared to the 3MB-per-die that a Q9400 has access to.

 

[VirtualLarry]

See if you can still upgrade a Win7 system to Win-10 for free. Doing this to your sister's rig would make it hack-resistant.

LOL. My whole network is compromised so hard. I think that I have nation-state malware on here. Win10 is like a sieve, like swiss-cheese.

I know several signs of a system compromise in progress. It seems that whatever new boxen I bring online, even new laptops, seem to get compromised in a matter of days. It's pretty frustrating.

Just putting an up-to-date fresh install of WIn10 on something is NO PROTECTION against being hacked pretty severely.

 

[chrisjames61]

See if you can still upgrade a Win7 system to Win-10 for free. Doing this to your sister's rig would make it hack-resistant. That is the only change I would make to the 2 systems.

Windows 10 hack resistant? First time I have ever heard that.

 

[BigDaveX]

Windows 10 hack resistant? First time I have ever heard that.

Well, "resistant" technically doesn't mean the same thing as "immune".

Still, Windows 10 does have the important advantage of MS still actively delivering security fixes for it, which they're no longer doing with Windows 7.

 

[chrisjames61]

Well, "resistant" technically doesn't mean the same thing as "immune".

Still, Windows 10 does have the important advantage of MS still actively delivering security fixes for it, which they're no longer doing with Windows 7.

That is true. There are always alternative operating systems.

 

[JPB]

I still run a Core 2 E8600 and a EVGA 9800GTX+. How does this one compare to the Quads ?