Intel QX9650 vs Q6600

[Ibreakthings]

I have a Q6600 OC to 3.00GHz and was wondering if its worth it to upgrade to a QX9650 for 100$ and OC it to 3.6GHZ or even higher on the Hyper TX3 and yes its a great cooler my temps never peak 60 on 100% load and no i dont want any Intel I3/I5/I7 series is this worth it in the FPS and rending times area?

 

[Shneiky]

The TX3 will not handle QX9650 at 3.6. It will barely handle it at its stock 3.0 GHz and most likely give you a bit higher temps as you already have without the OC. It is not a 100 bucks well spend.

 

[ubercake]

No. It's not worth it. If you don't upgrade your architecture, you're going to see very little benefit with regard to FPS.

 

[jimmysmitty]

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/49?vs=53

At their stock speeds of 3GHz and 2.4GHz (same speed difference between 3GHz and 3.6GHz overclocks) the Q9650 (same as the QX9650 but no unlocked multiplier for overclocking) performs quite better, in most cases about 20% better which is pretty good considering that Yorkfield (the Q8/9 series CPUs) was a die shrink.

That said, you would benefit vastly more going from a Q6600 to a newer i5. Even going from a Q6600 to a i5 2500K would be a much more vast improvement:

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/288?vs=53

If you could budget it a i5 4000 series would make a much more massive improvement to everything you are doing.

http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/coolermaster_hyper_tx3_review,6.html

There is a review of your cooler at a stock of 3.2GHz and overclocked 3.6GHz QX9770 (same as QX9650 just clocked higher stock) and at 80% that CPU runs at 66c which is not too bad for that CPU. Remember the QX9650 was a die shrink to 45nm and as well included a new HkMg design that helped reduce leakage quite a bit so it runs cooler than its 65nm predecessor.

 

[Ibreakthings]

But all in all i could get a Hyper 212 and the QX9650 on ebay for 100$
I think on the 212+ with arctic cooling fans on it and 4 case fans i think i could push 3.6 or 3.8 would there but a difference in speed at all?

 

[Ibreakthings]

And Q6600 is 65NM and the QX9650 is 45NM

 

[jimmysmitty]

And Q6600 is 65NM and the QX9650 is 45NM

I know, I stated that was one of the benefits of the QX9650.

 

[ko888]

There's also a 267 MHz increase in FSB speed and a 4MB increase in L2 cache size.

 

[Ibreakthings]

So would a QX9650 @ 3.6GHz be pretty good for todays games? I want to start playing Call Of Duty and various other games

 

[reedo_43]

I did the exact thing back in the day. After awhile I realized it was a poor investment. Ended up adding an ssd and selling the rig. Ungraded to gen 4 core I5 and couldn't be happier.

 

[ubercake]

I did the exact thing back in the day. After awhile I realized it was a poor investment. Ended up adding an ssd and selling the rig. Ungraded to gen 4 core I5 and couldn't be happier.

This. CPUs upgrades within the same architecture (especially when that close) will not give you great gaming performance boosts; usually a couple of percent translating to one or two fps.

 

[clonazepam]

So hitting 3.6 or even 3.2 Ghz on that Q6600 is out of the question? I still have a soft spot in my heart for that lil guy. Now I feel guilty that it's sitting out in the garage =/

I had all of the same thoughts as you back in the day, wanting to pop in the newer 775 processors. At the time, I just spent $50 on the Corsair H50 instead, and ramped the clock up to 3.6 Ghz. Oh I also put in a SSD that I knew I'd use again later (still am). I was also tied to an older board with DDR2 memory, so a full upgrade would've been much more expensive (new board, new RAM, new cpu, etc)

 

[Ibreakthings]

So your saying that something that is 20NM Newer An extra 4MB cache and a .6GHz boost will only increase fps by 3?

 

[jimmysmitty]

So your saying that something that is 20NM Newer An extra 4MB cache and a .6GHz boost will only increase fps by 3?

http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/intel_core_2_extreme_qx9650_processor_review,9.html

The thing is that while at lower resolutions, where the CPU becomes a bigger bottleneck, it will perform better. But at higher resolutions it will start to depend more on the GPU. What this does show though is that the CPU will not become a bottleneck as fast as others if it performs better at lower resolutions.

In the end going from a Q6600 to a QX9650 wont benefit you as much as doing a much newer system. The difference in process size benefits the QX9650 in that it can clock higher using less power and producing less heat (this is also coupled with Intels HkMg and hafnium designs). The extra cache will benefit some applications but games tend not to benefit as much. The clock speed will however benefit games but as you can see in the benchmark it depends on the game as some become vastly GPU bound at higher resolutions.

 

[Shneiky]

http://anandtech.com/bench/product/53?vs=49

20% increase if you clock the QX to 3.6 GHz. That is if you can reach it. You should notice the linear scaling between Core 2 Quads from different generations. If you clock the QX9650 to 3.3 - then you get only 10% increase.

All in all - when games are considered, your GT 320 is much larger bottleneck. A GT 740 will be much much much wiser investment for 100 bucks.

 

[4Ryan6]

But all in all i could get a Hyper 212 and the QX9650 on ebay for 100$
I think on the 212+ with arctic cooling fans on it and 4 case fans i think i could push 3.6 or 3.8 would there but a difference in speed at all?

I overclocked my Q9550 to 4ghz with believe it or not a Xigmatek S1283 running 2 110cfm cooling fans, back then I would have loved to have had a QX9650 as overclocking it would have been so much simpler.

I would like to share my concerns in that it is not just the CPU, whether it is an unlocked multiplier CPU or not, the rest of the overclocking hardware is very important in reaching your goals.

You have got to keep any overclock as cool as possible or your CPU will be throttling to protect itself, many wave their overclocking flags and brag until they run benchmarks and discover the performance is better without the overclock.

Why?

Because the CPU is internally throttling to protect itself it is like a school bus with a built in speed governor, except difference being, if you can keep the CPU cool enough you can operate below the governors activation point.

When the CPU throttles to protect itself your end resulting performance is less than it should be.

That said cooling is imperative to any overclocking.

You do realize that anyone that initially bought a QX9650, probably bought it initially to overclock it, so you may be getting a crippled CPU, you need to think about that, you could be buying someones problem!

However if you are determined to do it, then let us know how it goes?

 

[ubercake]

So your saying that something that is 20NM Newer An extra 4MB cache and a .6GHz boost will only increase fps by 3?

http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/intel_core_2_extreme_qx9650_processor_review,9.html

The thing is that while at lower resolutions, where the CPU becomes a bigger bottleneck, it will perform better. But at higher resolutions it will start to depend more on the GPU. What this does show though is that the CPU will not become a bottleneck as fast as others if it performs better at lower resolutions.

In the end going from a Q6600 to a QX9650 wont benefit you as much as doing a much newer system. The difference in process size benefits the QX9650 in that it can clock higher using less power and producing less heat (this is also coupled with Intels HkMg and hafnium designs). The extra cache will benefit some applications but games tend not to benefit as much. The clock speed will however benefit games but as you can see in the benchmark it depends on the game as some become vastly GPU bound at higher resolutions.

This link provides a great example of what I was talking about. We can see the gaming performance advantage decrease as the resolution increases. If the chart went further, to show 1080p resolution and beyond, the gaming performance difference becomes zero.

Again, I really think you should save for an architecture upgrade. I would be willing to bet with the increased bus speeds (e.g. PCIe 3.0 vs 1.0) and memory speeds (e.g. DDR3 vs DDR2) of a modern PC architecture, you'd have better gaming performance with an i3 at 3GHz or above even without an overclock on a Z97 board.

 

[Ibreakthings]

Err i actually have a G41 board with 2x4GB DDR3 RAM OC 7-7-7-18 and im getting the GTX750 TI

 

[sammy sung]

I have a friend whom I just sold a Q9650 non extreme version to in order to replace his Q6600. He's seen a great many benefits from the upgrade, in both fps terms while gaming, all the way to things he can now to fluently whereas he couldn't before. He can screen capture 720p and 1080p gameplay much more easily than before.

His words also, "everything just seems snappier"

Now that bit of real world experience aside, it's probably not worth $100 to most people. I can't speak for you of course. If I had $100 in my pocket for a processor, and were in your shoes, I'd save another month or two and jump platforms to z97. I sold the processor to my friend for $40(I was selling it in general for $80, but again, he's a friend.)

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/49?vs=53

If gaming is your only concern, skim to the bottom for a few relevant benches

 

[jimmysmitty]

Err i actually have a G41 board with 2x4GB DDR3 RAM OC 7-7-7-18 and im getting the GTX750 TI

That chipset is still using PCIe 1.1 which is a pretty big bottleneck for modern GPUs.

 

[Ibreakthings]

Im going to run 2x 24' 1920x1080 1080P so i got the graphics under control

 

[jimmysmitty]

Im going to run 2x 24' 1920x1080 1080P so i got the graphics under control

I think you tend to misunderstand or ignore what is being said. You board has a PCIe 1.1 lane. While the GPU will work it might present a bottleneck and the GPU might not perform as you are wanting in games.

 

[Ibreakthings]

My board has a PCIe 16x

 

[jimmysmitty]

Yes we know that. It has a PCIe 1.1 x16 lane, as I said before. There are different versions of PCIe. There was 1.0/1.1, 2.0 and the current 3.0. Each version got faster than the previous. 2.0 is 2x faster than 1.0/1.1 and 3.0 is 2x faster than 2.0 making it 4x faster than 1.0/1.1.

That means you will not be able to run the GTX 750Ti at its maximum connection speed and thus it will possibly slower than you would expect.