Worth upgrading system to q6600 and overclocking?

[ShreddedWheat]

I have an e5200 oced to 3.4 with 4 gigs ram and ATi 5850. I mainly surf the net and play games such as Crysis; but want to play Bad Company 2, Metro 2033, etc....in the future. Is it worth getting a q6600 on ebay for around 100 buck. Don't want to upgrade entire system at this time...DDR3 memory is too much $. Just trying to get another year+ out of my system.

 

[LoneNinja]

I personally would say it's worth it, some will argue it's not because 775 is dead, but it's still going to be a good performance gain. It'll be an even better upgrade if you can sell your E5200, it isn't worth much, but it'll make the upgrade cheaper.

 

[MisterDonut]

Gonna see big jumps in minimums for those listed games, me thinks. Otherwise, consider just saving for a full platform bump.

 

[Arkaign]

An oc'd 6600/6700 with a 5850 and 4gb is a perfect match IMO. Should be good to go until the 5850 is up for replacement (12-18mos?). At which time a full platform upgrade will be a go, and the old stuff will still be at least worth a few bucks to offset that cost.

Happy gaming~!!

 

[Arkaign]

Sorry for the bump, but I just had to comment :

The Q6600/Q6700 have to go down in history as some of the absolute best CPUs of all time, think about it .. the people who bought them on day 1 could still run them today with a decent OC and run just about any game/app out there as good as most stock new PCs. That's wild for as long as it's been. I got a PhII X4 a while back, and even that was only about equal, and it was years between those releases.

 

[daveymark]

if you don't live near a microcenter or fry's, stick with the 6600.

 

[aigomorla]

Sorry for the bump, but I just had to comment :

The Q6600/Q6700 have to go down in history as some of the absolute best CPUs of all time, think about it ..

without a doubt.

G0 steppings made these guys into even bigger monsters.

Also the thing about kentsfields vs yorkfields were in durability.
Yorkfields did overclock like crazy, but they were like ballerinas.
You push them too hard and they will break fast.

But kentsfields... i still have friends who runs there kentsfields @ 1.5Vcore under water and there still chugging along.

 

[johnny.dacu]

I think you should give up and take a new one; it's not worth it to put money in your e5200 because you risk to over force it and to lead it to crush. So, you may try to sell it to someone that needs only simple application. You won't get too much, but it will help you to save some money for the new system.

 

[evolucion8]

If its possible, try to get at least a Q9450 used (or Q9550), it has full 12MB of cache and has slightly faster performance per IPC compared to the Q6600, but if it's too expensive, just get the Q6600 G0 stepping and overclock the hell out of it, I used to have a QX6850 which is basically an unlocked Q6600 G0 and it was able to withstand high Vcores, I was able to overclock it to 3.60GHz with 1.52V and worked like a champ, but beware, its heat dissipation and temperatures are horrible, I barely managed to keep it under control with a Sunbeam CCT 120.

 

[SZLiao214]

A friend of mine was getting rid of some of his old parts and sold me his crappy mobo with a q6600 in it for 30 bucks.

I went from a e5200 oced to 3.5 to a q6600 oced to 3.6. The performance difference was pretty huge in WoW and Dragonage. Any of the games that scales well with quad core will show a nice jump. (not sure about metro/bad company)

 

[SanDiegoPC]

One of my machines still uses that o'clocked Q6600 GO. In fact it was my last build, before I put together this i7 based machine. The Q6600 is still overclocked and still uses stock heat sink. I now use it to run a bunch of astronomy applications and my telescope. Three years in, and never a hickup.

 

[bryanW1995]

I have a q6600 and two 45nm equivalents (q9450 and x3350). My thoughts on the q6600 are that it's a badass cpu but it puts out tons of heat and requires excellent cooling to maintain nice overclocks. That q9450/x3350 don't need as much cooling ability but are extremely hard to keep over 3.5 or so for 24/7 heavy use. they are also about 5-10% better per clock, so figure 3.3-3.4 on one of them is like 3.6 on a q6600. I don't know what the price difference is however.

 

[cubeless]

bad company buries a 3.5 dual, runs nicely on a 3.5 q6700, not much better on a 4ghz 9550 (with dual 4850's in all)... but definitely the 6700 is a furnace, although the 9550 ain't no snow cone...