P4 to Conroe, smart upgrade?

[vatek]

The new E6600 looks real tempting.

I'm running a P4 550 3.4 Prescott right now, with 2gb of DDR2 533 and a BFG 7800GTX OC.

Is the 6600 going to give me a good enough performance boost to justify buying it, or will I just bottleneck on my video card?

 

[Keysplayr]

Originally posted by: vatek
The new E6600 looks real tempting.

I'm running a P4 550 3.4 Prescott right now, with 2gb of DDR2 533 and a BFG 7800GTX OC.

Is the 6600 going to give me a good enough performance boost to justify buying it, or will I just bottleneck on my video card?

If gaming is all you do, your video card will be a big time bottleneck. It's probably slightly bottlenecking your system right now. 3.4 P4 is pretty quick.

 

[zsdersw]

Yes, it's a smart upgrade.

The E6600 (or any other Core 2 Duo) is:

- Dual-core
- Faster in general performance (especially in multitasking situations)
- Much cooler / consumes less power

 

[jg0001]

I have the EXACT same P4 3.4 in my older PC. In fact, I've been using it to build my newer PC. I ended up getting a e6400 (still waiting on my e6700). OC'd 150% or not, this sucker BLOWS AWAY the P4 3.4 (550) single core. It's not even close. Get it. Get it now.

As to the vidcard being a bottleneck... I have a 7900GTX --- with the e6400, I am getting far higher framerates then I did with the P4 3.4.

 

[eelw]

I've moved from my 3.4 Northwood to a E6400. The greatest night and day difference is in my video encoding with h.264. I can do real time encoding with my Conroe, while I would say my Northwood is like 4-5x slower for this same task. But other than that, overall usability, there is very little difference between the two processors. That being said, it was a great $400 (cnd) spent to get my E6400 and ASRock 775Dual VSTA.

 

[vatek]

Now all I need is an Intel-based 590 SLI board and I can do this upgrade.

There goes a good chunk of my paychecks this month.

 

[dexvx]

Previous nForce boards sucked. Just use modded drivers on 975/965 boards.