[SOLVED] I wanna upgrade an old rig

[XtremeOC_Tech]

I have two old rigs. One is running an AMD Athlon II X3 445 with 3 cores and 4GB of DDR3 RAM, with a possible max of 16GB. I know I can unlock the fourth core, but I'm not sure how. The second rig is running a Core 2 Quad Q6600 and 4GB of DDR2 memory, with a possible max of 8GB. I have a EVGA GTX 660 SC and I wanna upgrade the RAM in either one of those PCs. Which one should I upgrade for the best performance.
Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks!

 

[cdrkf]

I have two old rigs. One is running an AMD Athlon II X3 445 with 3 cores and 4GB of DDR3 RAM, with a possible max of 16GB. I know I can unlock the fourth core, but I'm not sure how. The second rig is running a Core 2 Quad Q6600 and 4GB of DDR2 memory, with a possible max of 8GB. I have a EVGA GTX 660 SC and I wanna upgrade the RAM in either one of those PCs. Which one should I upgrade for the best performance.
Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks!

The most important thing to know is the make / model of the motherboards in both machines as you may have options of CPU upgrades for either.

It would also be helpful to know your goals with the upgrade - are you trying to boost gaming performance?

In terms of unlocking the 4th core on the AMD CPU, that is an option on some AMD motherboards but not all. I used to have a Phenom II X3 which I did unlock, however my cpu would crash with the 4th core enabled so it's not certain that it will work properly once unlocked (I did successfully unlock a Phenom II X4 960T into a 6 core in a build I did for a friend so it can work).

I would say you are probably going to have more luck upgrading the AMD machine than the Intel just as it's a little newer, although it does depend on what motherboard you have. If it's one of the newer AM3 boards you could have quite a few options CPU wise, including things like a Phenom II X4 or even an X6 which would be much faster in games and have more cache than the athlon cpu.

 

[XtremeOC_Tech]

The most important thing to know is the make / model of the motherboards in both machines as you may have options of CPU upgrades for either.

It would also be helpful to know your goals with the upgrade - are you trying to boost gaming performance?

In terms of unlocking the 4th core on the AMD CPU, that is an option on some AMD motherboards but not all. I used to have a Phenom II X3 which I did unlock, however my cpu would crash with the 4th core enabled so it's not certain that it will work properly once unlocked (I did successfully unlock a Phenom II X4 960T into a 6 core in a build I did for a friend so it can work).

I would say you are probably going to have more luck upgrading the AMD machine than the Intel just as it's a little newer, although it does depend on what motherboard you have. If it's one of the newer AM3 boards you could have quite a few options CPU wise, including things like a Phenom II X4 or even an X6 which would be much faster in games and have more cache than the athlon cpu.

I'm gonna be doing some light gaming, as well as using it as a cloud server. The motherboard for Intel is the MSI P35 Neo2 (MS-7345) with 4 DIMMs and LGA 775. The AMD one is actually a prebuilt, and the motherboard is the Foxconn 2A92 with 4 DIMMs and AM3.

 

[geofelt]

The cpu performance is quite similar.
The X3 has 3 cores and a passmark rating of 1697 and a single thread rating of 1283.
The Q6600 has 4 threads with a rating of 1794 and a single thread rating of 973.

Games usually depend on single thread performance. But, there are some games that simply will not run on less than 4 threads.

What is your budget?

 

[cdrkf]

I'm gonna be doing some light gaming, as well as using it as a cloud server. The motherboard for Intel is the MSI P35 Neo2 (MS-7345) with 4 DIMMs and LGA 775. The AMD one is actually a prebuilt, and the motherboard is the Foxconn 2A92 with 4 DIMMs and AM3.

Looking up the motherboards, looks like the AMD board can take up to a Phenom II X4 (no support for the X6 series). Would possibly worth looking to find a second hand Phenom II X4 900 series chip as that would give you a nice boost for modern games - add in some more DDR3 ram and you should be good (which is typically easier to find than DDR2).

On the Intel side, that looks to be a really good quality socket 775 motherboard, although the Q6600 is pretty basic. That board has full support for even the Core 2 Quad Extreme processors based on the support list:
https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/support/P35_Platinum#support-cpu

The Q9000 / QX9000 series cpu's would be worth looking at as an upgrade for that, the main issue for that board is the limitation of DDR2 ram, you would need to max it out to 8gb to be able to run most games.

 

[XtremeOC_Tech]

The cpu performance is quite similar.
The X3 has 3 cores and a passmark rating of 1697 and a single thread rating of 1283.
The Q6600 has 4 threads with a rating of 1794 and a single thread rating of 973.

Games usually depend on single thread performance. But, there are some games that simply will not run on less than 4 threads.

What is your budget?

I'm not really on a budget. I'm just looking for a cheap RAM upgrade.

 

[XtremeOC_Tech]

Looking up the motherboards, looks like the AMD board can take up to a Phenom II X4 (no support for the X6 series). Would possibly worth looking to find a second hand Phenom II X4 900 series chip as that would give you a nice boost for modern games - add in some more DDR3 ram and you should be good (which is typically easier to find than DDR2).

On the Intel side, that looks to be a really good quality socket 775 motherboard, although the Q6600 is pretty basic. That board has full support for even the Core 2 Quad Extreme processors based on the support list:
https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/support/P35_Platinum#support-cpu

The Q9000 / QX9000 series cpu's would be worth looking at as an upgrade for that, the main issue for that board is the limitation of DDR2 ram, you would need to max it out to 8gb to be able to run most games.

How would my AMD PC do if I upgraded to 16GB but kept the CPU?

 

[cdrkf]

How would my AMD PC do if I upgraded to 16GB but kept the CPU?

Well, it depends on what you are doing - a tri core is pretty limiting these days but for light duties it would be ok. I guess it depends on what you want to do with the machine - for web browsing and so on then upgrading the ram will be fine. For gaming, it depends but a lot of modern games really need 4 cores.

 

[geofelt]

If you want cheap, buy only a 4gb upgrade.
That is sufficient so long as you are not running many apps.
Having more ram than you need does not improve performance.
If you do not have a 64 bit os, you can't use more than 4gb regardless.

 

[XtremeOC_Tech]

Well, it depends on what you are doing - a tri core is pretty limiting these days but for light duties it would be ok. I guess it depends on what you want to do with the machine - for web browsing and so on then upgrading the ram will be fine. For gaming, it depends but a lot of modern games really need 4 cores.

But in terms of Gaming performance, am I correct in saying the Q6600 is better?

 

[XtremeOC_Tech]

If you want cheap, buy only a 4gb upgrade.
That is sufficient so long as you are not running many apps.
Having more ram than you need does not improve performance.
If you do not have a 64 bit os, you can't use more than 4gb regardless.

I am currently running 64 bit.

 

[cdrkf]

But in terms of Gaming performance, am I correct in saying the Q6600 is better?

Than the Athlon X3... they are roughly on par I would say (the Q6600 has 4 cores but its clocked lower, with a good overclock the Q6600 is faster).

That said, of the two platforms, the AM3 can be pushed further if you were to find a second hand Phenom II X4 to drop into it.