Time to upgrade??? Running a Q6600 @ 3.6ghz...

[orion23]

Hey guys!

I've had my rig for about 2 years now and my Q6600 runs @ 3.6ghz from day one.
DDR2 1066mhz
and an ATI HD 5850

Would I notice a difference if I were to upgrade to an I7 920 CPU (to be overclocked to 3.6ghz @ least) and new DDR3 @ let's say 1600mhz?

Is it worth it?
Gaming?
Winrar performance?

Thanks!

 

[Chapbass]

I'd be willing to bet winrar performance would be significantly better, but depending on the game, I wouldn't bother.

Granted, this coming from a person who things his athlon x3 is perfectly fine...

 

[RavenSEAL]

Wait for sandy bridge.

 

[Arkaign]

SSDs in Raid would make a far bigger difference than Q6600 @ 3.6 to i7.

 

[WT]

I have the same upgrade itch as OP .. a Q6700@3.5 with a GTX280, but for the games I play (all older games, TF2, CoH:OF, Wings of Prey) nothing requires more than I have.

I even scored a free X4 965 BE and it turns out it isn't any faster than my OC'd Q6700.

Hang in there and resist the upgrade urge unless something you start playing REQUIRES the extra horsepower, otherwise its wasted $$$.

 

[perdomot]

SSDs would be my pick as well although raid is not needed to see tremendous boost in performance. I'd go with Vertex 2 myself.

 

[GrumpyMan]

New SSD is a great idea, I'm also waiting for SB to come out and then I will make a decision, I currently run a E8500 at 3.8. But I sure do have that upgrade bug though, must keep it at bay.

 

[MrCoyote]

SSDs in Raid would make a far bigger difference than Q6600 @ 3.6 to i7.

I thought that TRIM didn't work with RAID?

Anyway, I am running a Q6600 at stock speed with a Gigabyte EX38-DQ6 mainboard and 8GB DDR2-800 Mushkin Blue memory and a BFG 9600GT 512GB. It has been a great system, but I've been thinking of upgrading, since DDR3 memory is finally coming down in price. Although this system is O/C stable, I don't O/C due to using this system for a home video studio rendering.

The problem I now have, is working with clients HD 1080p videos are really slow to render out and write to BD-R. It sometimes takes all night to render 1080p, with the Q6600. Sony Vegas Pro 10 supports CUDA H264 acceleration encoding, but my video card is slower than CPU and it suggests to use CPU for all rendering.

I bought a Mushkin 90GB SSD and two 1TB Samsung F3's, but haven't installed them yet. Should I just go ahead and install them with a fresh O/S and get a faster video card? Or should I wait for Sandy Bridge and AMD Bulldozer to complete the build?

 

[MyLeftNut]

For gaming, no. That quad at 3.6ghz will hold pretty well at higher resolutions with current videocards. You could probably even skip Sandy Bridge and go for Haswell.

 

[orion23]

Thank you all for your suggestions.

I definately have the upgrade bug....I miss building new PC's all the time which became very expensive @ one point, reason why I've had my current system this long.

Whatever games I play run great, no issues there...I just wanted to upgrade and be more up to date if the speed increase can be justified.

 

[Brock123]

I haven't looked at ssd's since I bought my two but if I remember correctly trim helps maintain write speeds. Seeing how raid is almost twice as fast you shouldn't miss it to much.