I think my CPU is limiting my hand-me-down system.

[balane]

lol I'm so confused.

 

[Arkaign]

The 6750 is a great CPU, you will see a profound improvement in performance. At the same clock rates, the 45nm w/2MB or 1MB of L2 will be slower. It's easier to get the 45nm chips near or past 4ghz, but with a 5770 it's not gonna matter really.

http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=2156&page=5

3.33ghz or so should pretty much be a lock on stock volts. Which would be fine.

They're pretty tough chips, so if the previous owner didn't just totally abuse it with huge voltage and poor cooling, it should be just fine.

Happy gaming!

 

[balane]

OK, I'll give it a shot and see what I can OC it to. Can't hurt to try it out I guess. The guy says it's never been overclocked but you know how that goes. You scared me when you said it was a stupid purchase even for $50.

 

[Arkaign]

OK, I'll give it a shot and see what I can OC it to. Can't hurt to try it out I guess. The guy says it's never been overclocked but you know how that goes. You scared me when you said it was a stupid purchase even for $50.

Hey I didn't say that, someone else did That person might have confused the 6750 with the older C2D 6300/6400/6600/6700/etc series. The original 6300 and 6400 had 2MB of cache and the 6600/etc had 4MB of cache on 1066 bus. The 6750 was on the 1333fsb, and was 2.66ghz stock. By the time the 6750 (and 6550/etc) came out, mobos had gotten better and Intel had really gotten the 65nm process pretty much ironclad.

In the future, you can probably flip that cpu again for what you paid for it and grab a Q6700 for cheapish (keep your eyes out). The Q6700 are all G0 stepping, whereas many Q6600 are the older and not as robustly overclockable B3 stepping. Having the Q6700 would probably give that setup the absolute longest possible lifespan.

So a suggested plan :

Use the 6750 at ~3.3ghz for a year. If at that time you can find a Q6700 for $100ish or so, sell the 6750 and jump to that. As time goes by, more and more games and apps will make very good use of the extra cores.

 

[Arkaign]

Edit :

judging from completed Ebay auctions, some careful watching of open auctions shows that a Q6700 can be scooped up for $130-$150 pretty often, so in a year or so it should be decently less.

 

[balane]

Thanks for the tips Arkaign. Most likely when the time comes that this set up is no longer usable it will be receiving the i7 hardware when I upgrade that machine. I just want to be able to turn game settings up a little more for a little money until then.

Cheers.

 

[toyota]

I personally would not try and sell the Core 2 Duo E6750 you just purchased since it has the higher cache (4MB) vs. the 2MB in the E6800, even though the Pentium has a much higher clock speed.

I'm big on cache and there is a reason why the E6750 is a Core 2 Duo while the E6800 is branded as a Pentium.

You may not notice this difference in games, however.

well just because it is a Pentium by name doesn't mean it cant be better/faster than a much older Core 2 Duo.

 

[Arkaign]

well just because it is a Pentium by name doesn't mean it cant be better/faster than a much older Core 2 Duo.

well just because it is a Pentium by name doesn't mean it cant be better/faster than a much older Core 2 Duo.

That's very true, it helps to just look at :

65nm vs. 45nm (likely OC ceiling)
Clock speed
Bus speed
Multipier
Cache size

By far the most predictive indicators of performance from any S775 CPU outside of the number of cores is the clock speed and cache size, with bus speed not as critical, and multiplier/core revision only helping with the idea of your general oc ceiling.

Whether it's called C2D, Pentium Dual Core, etc, is just Intel naming. After all they did make C2Ds with 2MB as well

 

[TurtleCrusher]

I'd go with a quad core. Sell the 6750 and use that cash and your gifcard for a Qxxxx series. It will last soooooooooo much longer with apps going multithreaded left and right. Even some web browsers are multithreaded... Not much time before everything catches up.