Considering upgrading but...

[crashingmedic]

I have the below build...

Q6600 oc'ed to 3.0 Ghz (stock voltage)
Artic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro
ASROCK Penryn 1600SLI-110db motherboard
EVGA GTX260 896MB Superclocked Edition
WD Black 1TB
WD Black 750GB
8GB (4X2GB) PC2 6400 Corsair XMS2 (DDR2800)
Sony DRU810A DVDRW
Pioneer DVDRW
Coolmax 950 PS (CUG-950B)
Antec NineHundred Ultimate Gamer Case
2 - Acer AL2223W 22” LCDs
Dual OS Boot
W7 Ultimate 64-Bit
XP Pro 32-Bit

This pc is primarily for day trading, heavy math intensive charting applications for trading, extreme multi-tasking (meaning 20+ programs open simultaneously while trading and using 5GB RAM for real), and light gaming every now and then (new AVP, Bioshock 2, SF4, Left 4 Dead, a few other newer games).

I'm considering upgrading to an i7 930 setup but @ $600 price tag for a new motherboard, cpu and RAM are a real turn off. The last time I upgraded was from a Pentium D 940 to a Q6600 and I noticed a huge performance gain. Back then (in 2007) it cost me @ $250 to upgrade. Now, I'm not confident that if I splurge and upgrade to an i7 930 that I will see the type of gain I did back then.

I know that the i7 is an awesome cpu. But I've read many, many posts, especially on newegg and on the overclocker's forum that people are sorry they upgraded from a C2Q setup to i7 due to the cost and lack of real world difference they experience. Most of the reasons were due to the overclockability of the C2Q cpus. Many people using C2Q clocked in the mid 3.? Ghz saw marginal performance difference from an i7 upgrade, especially for the high cost of all new components. This was also the case when the i7's were overclocked to near 4Ghz. I don't want to pay $600 for a marginal or hardly noticeable performance gain.

This brings me to another option that I found while searching for prices online. I could get an AMD x6 1055T for @ $200, and AMD motherboard for @ $100+ and use my current DDR2 RAM. If I sell my q6600 and old motherboad on ebay I would probably come out with an out of pocket cost of @ $150 or less. The AMD motherboards I am looking at are here...

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=Property&N=100007625&IsNodeId=1&PropertyCodeValue=3880%3A27177%2C3880%3A27176%2C3879%3A27158%2C3879%3A27244%2C3879%3A31644%2C3879%3A39004%2C727%3A28042%2C727%3A10630%2C727%3A19237%2C727%3A47036%2C727%3A10688%2C727%3A34404%2C727%3A10689%2C727%3A47153%2C727%3A20581%2C727%3A55530%2C727%3A11340%2C727%3A48086%2C4944%3A34970%2C4944%3A57684%2C4944%3A36126%2C4944%3A34969%2C4944%3A72183&bop=And&Order=RATING&PageSize=100

I do not use SLI and if need be I can use my spare AMD video card (HD 5770 that's in my wife's machine) on an AMD board.

Let me know what you all think about this option. If it's not worth it to go the AMD route then I'm probably going to stick with my original plan and wait till next summer to consider upgrading unless a fantastic deal shows itself to me. Thanks for reading...EWB

 

[xaira]

dude their both quads, and unless you are video encoding like crazy, keep the c2q, it snot worht it by any stretch of the immagination to me, a quad @3.0ghz should be sufficient until the octocores come out next year, keep the quad, you can upgrade the gpu with that money

 

[crashingmedic]

I figured as much...I'll probably just wait and see what happens as new components are released.

 

[saaiello]

I would say the best thing you could use some upgrading on is your hard drives. A nice raid array or an SSD will give you a better performance boost then upgrading to an I7 the C2Q are very capable CPU's even though you have the first gen C2Q its still a very capable processor. I would wait on the processor for at least a year before I would even consider upgrading basically going froma a quad to another quad isn't really a good upgrade I would like to see at least 6 preferably 8 core chips before I think it would be a real worthy upgrade.