I5 or E8400 wondering

[zod96]

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....

 

[error8]

The best upgrade for you to do would be to get a Q9550 and overclock it as high as you can. It's not going to be miles behind the i5 and it will save a lot of your dollars, because you don't have to change the mobo and ram.

 

[zod96]

Aw good Idea I never thought of that 🙂

 

[boomhower]

For gaming I with a single GPU I don't think the 9550 will give you much if anything over the 8400 in the vast majority of games. Regardless I wouldn't invest any more money in 775, stick with what you have or do a whole sale upgrade to i5/i7.

 

[Pneumothorax]

My buddy and I had a similar dilemma. He came from a POS Celeron 430 single core cpu. In his case, his cpu would've bottlenecked his 5870 even at 1920x1200. Your E8400 should easily overclock to 3.6 on your setup. Unless you're running at 1024x768, the vast majority of games will be running neck to neck between a 3.6ghz core2duo vs. a quad.
And yes he did get the q9550.