Upgrading Q6600 rig - need advice

[Atheus]

I'm feeling I want to upgrade my GA-P35-DS3P/Q6600 G0/8800GT rig - my main machine at home, used for a bit of work, and a bit of gaming. I don't need to build some kind of superpowered freak though, since I've recently bought the new macbook pro, and already have my office machine and server for real work, and a PS3 for games. Basically I don't want to spend too much if I don't have to.

option 1) Watercool and overclock the s**t out of the Q6600 and the board, get a new video card, and new hard drives, possibly including an SSD. I've heard the raw processing power of an I5 and even an I7 can be matched by a well tuned Q6600.

Pros - Cheap, fun to watercool and overvolt.

Cons - Will I be bottlenecked by bus speed access to the vid card and main memory with this board? My memory does not overclock well and buying new DDRII seems a waste...

option 2) Get a new board which supports socket 775 and DDR3, buy some nice DDR3 I can re-use, THEN watercool and overclock the s**t out of the Q6600.

Pros - Less memory bandwidth problems? Or will this type of board still lag behind the I7 chipsets significantly?

Cons - I'll be buying a board I'll throw away in a year, which means I'll buy a cheap board, and I hate cheap boards.

option 3) Just buy an I7 system.

Pros - Fast.

Cons - Expensive. Totally misses the point. If this is my best option I'll just wait.

So...

What do you all think?

 

[Arcanedeath]

You have a fairly balanced system now, If you get a good air or water cooler for your Q6600 and overclock plus get a new video card that would be your best bet to make your system live longer. If you are mainly concerned about CPU performance I'd just wait as i7 kills the Q6600 unless heavily overclocked. no point in going dd3 as that will take a new motherboard

 

[bamacre]

I'm still gaming with my Q6600 at stock speeds. I'd seriously recommend just getting an HD 5770 or GTX 460 and see if that alone satisfies your performance needs. Wait until next year at least before upgrading cpu.

 

[Atheus]

I'm still gaming with my Q6600 at stock speeds. I'd seriously recommend just getting an HD 5770 or GTX 460 and see if that alone satisfies your performance needs. Wait until next year at least before upgrading cpu.

Yea that's partly my thinking too. Okay the 'buy a new I7 now' option is out.

You have a fairly balanced system now, If you get a good air or water cooler for your Q6600 and overclock plus get a new video card that would be your best bet to make your system live longer. If you are mainly concerned about CPU performance I'd just wait as i7 kills the Q6600 unless heavily overclocked.

I've already got good air cooling and run a small 2.8-3.0 Ghz overclock 24/7 and sometimes raise it for gaming - although the fans get a bit loud. When I say 'overclock the s**t' I mean really push it, maybe 3.6Ghz 24/7 until it dies, and near silent too with water

Do you think it would be worth pushing the processor like that to avoid bottlenecking the new vid card? Or wouldn't it matter?

no point in going dd3 as that will take a new motherboard

Yea, very true, and I like my current Gigabyte board - it's one of the durability ones with the solid state caps. Should be as good as the day it was made. But is 4GB enough for the next 12 months of gaming? And isn't the main advantge of the new platforms their huge memory bandwidth? What about bandwidth to the video card itself?

I guess if I bought some new fast DDR2 for overclocking I could migrate my home machine's memory to work and have 4GB there instead of 2... but DRR2 prices are such a joke ATM... anyone got any idea when/if they might go down again?

More advice appreciated!

 

[dfuze]

I don't think DDR2 will ever drop since DDR3 is the now defacto type for new builds. I'm not sure, but would guess they don't make DDR2 anymore, or at least not in great quantities which is what brings down the prices.

I agree with the suggestion to keep you Q6600 for a while; it's what I have and have no issues with it in gaming, and I only have it OCed to 3.0. I have 4gb of ram and and adding another 2gb to it which seems to be the only thing I need for some of the current games (Star Craft 2 and Bad Company 2).

 

[Atheus]

I don't think DDR2 will ever drop since DDR3 is the now defacto type for new builds. I'm not sure, but would guess they don't make DDR2 anymore, or at least not in great quantities which is what brings down the prices.

Good info - cheers.

I agree with the suggestion to keep you Q6600 for a while; it's what I have and have no issues with it in gaming, and I only have it OCed to 3.0. I have 4gb of ram and and adding another 2gb to it which seems to be the only thing I need for some of the current games (Star Craft 2 and Bad Company 2).

Yea I've pretty much decided to keep the Q6600. Building the watercooling to take it to 3.6 (4.0?) will be fun

As for RAM... I could add an extra 2GB for a total of 6 like you, but I'm more concerned with bandwidth than pure size. 4GB is fine on SC2 for me. I guess I need to look at some numbers for stock I7/DDR3 memory bandwidth vs highly tweaked C2D/DDR2... can anyone point me in that direction?

/edit:

http://www.primatelabs.ca/blog/2010/04/macbookpro-benchmarks/

Check out the 'Stream' benchmarks for Ix vs C2D - clear and huge difference but no overclocking taken into account. I would think numbers for PCs would be similar but I'd still like to see some tweaked/overclocked numbers.

 

[RebateMonger]

Yea I've pretty much decided to keep the Q6600. Building the watercooling to take it to 3.6 (4.0?) will be fun

Yeah, I really don't see anything wrong with what you have. I'd save my money for a next-generation system.

 

[Atheus]

I'd save my money for a next-generation system.

Especially considering I just spent nearly £900 on a new macbook. There's also the small matter of last year's tax still unpaid... 0_o

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/memory-scaling-i7,2325-7.html

These benchmarks show game performance scaling very little with faster DDR3 if at all - in fact only CPU limited games (read old stuff like Source engine) benefit from more memory bandwidth. This is only with a GTX 260 in the test system though...