Question Q6600 vs. Athlon II X3 450

[Titanion]

I know 3DMark03 is dated, but it is nostalgic, and I still use it to run older cards.

Should a Core 2 Q6600 @ 3.2 (and I know I can run it at 3.6 but forget the score) with 400x8 and 8GB of DDR2 @ ram handily outperform an Athlon II X3 450 @ 3.7 with 247X15 and 8GB of DDR2? The Core 2 Q6600 is running HD 4850 and gets 60K scores, but the Athlon II X3 450 is running HD 6850 and I think 42K was my highest score.

This are the two weakest computers in my gaming lab, and I do not mind pushing them or even accidently breaking them. I was not going to use the Athlon II X3 450 but I kept stealing the 775 heatsinks for 1155 CPUs, and the Athlon II X3 450 had an Artic Freezer Pro on it for AMD CPUs. So it just makes sense to use this setup rather than another Q6600 or Q6700 that I have with more generic heatsinks.

So I pushed the Athlon II X3 450 and am very happy with a stable and cool 3.7 overclock.

I know the Q6600 is better, but is it really that much better? Do these numbers lie? I am not going to try anything newer than 2015 games, so is the Q6600 that much better? Or is the HD 5850 really that much better than the HD 6850?

I unlocked the 4th core of the Athlon II X3 450 and it turned into a Phenom X4. I have not played with it much, but I threw caution to the wind and booted it up with my stable 3.7 overclock settings and got into Windows. The temps were much higher like I have read about, in the 50s instead of the 20s at idle.

I ran 3DMark03 with the Phenom X4 @ 3.7 and still only got 42K for a score. I ran Prime95 and it crashed instantly, so I went back to the X3. Maybe I will play with it later, but I think X3 @ 3.7 will be better than X4 @ 3.5, if I can even go that far with it, but it did load windows and run 3DMaek03.

Anyway, I can do some heatsink exchanging and replace the Athlon II X3 450 with another Q6600 in an ASUS P5K-e SLI motherboard. But it felt good to have this AMD setup in the mix, and I really wanted it to perform better.

 

[Eximo]

A bit of confusion on the GPU numbers there?

Take the faster GPU, put it in the Q6600 and see how it does. That will get you a better answer than having people try to recall back that far.

It really depends on if you want to concentrate on the synthetic benchmarks or look at real world performance. These days I would take the four threads over three pretty much every time, just for general browsing and such. Gaming, single core performance is still king, so back to the Q6600 and an overclock. 3.6Ghz is actually really easy with those, but 4Ghz+ was also very common.

 

[SamirD]

Take the faster GPU, put it in the Q6600 and see how it does. That will get you a better answer than having people try to recall back that far.

I would try this for sure. Sometimes GPUs don't play well with certain cpu/mb setups ime and you'll get better performance from some combos than others, especially if there seems to be something funny going on like the performance being 'stuck' even after a solid OC.

 

[Titanion]

5850s are faster than 6850s from everything I have read. I'll try a few different benchmarks and play around with it. I have a GTX 450 I can use in the Athlon II 450 X3 instead of the 6850 to see how it gets along.

I am more interested in the overall compatative strengths and weaknesses of the CPUs and systems, settling in on them.

 

[hotaru.hino]

Nitpicking, but unlocking the fourth core on an Athlon II X3 doesn't make it a Phenom II X4. All you did was turn it into an Athlon II X4 650.

That said though, the Athlon II appears to be competitive against Core 2 Quad 8300/8400s, which already beats out the Q6600.

 

[SamirD]

Nitpicking, but unlocking the fourth core on an Athlon II X3 doesn't make it a Phenom II X4. All you did was turn it into an Athlon II X4 650.

That said though, the Athlon II appears to be competitive against Core 2 Quad 8300/8400s, which already beats out the Q6600.

Interesting. I'm surprised at the Athlon's single thread performance as it should be faster overall than even a first gen i3:
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compar...650-vs-Intel-i3-540/159vs1038vs1041vs175vs738

 

[Mr.Spock]

go with the X3 - the Q6600 is limited to DDR2 so 4GB will be max for most applications.

 

[hotaru.hino]

go with the X3 - the Q6600 is limited to DDR2 so 4GB will be max for most applications.

4GB DDR2 modules are available. And RAM type has nothing to do with how much memory applications get.

 

[Mr.Spock]

the flaw there is most S775 motherboards never supported more than 2GB modules to begin with, not to mention the most advanced video for those would be AGP

4GB DDR2 modules are available. And RAM type has nothing to do with how much memory applications get.

 

[SamirD]

the flaw there is most S775 motherboards never supported more than 2GB modules to begin with, not to mention the most advanced video for those would be AGP

While it is true most LGA775 motherboards didn't support the 4GB DDR2 modules, most easily had full x16 pcie support, not just agp. I think you were confusing Socket 478 with LGA775.

 

[hotaru.hino]

the flaw there is most S775 motherboards never supported more than 2GB modules to begin with, not to mention the most advanced video for those would be AGP

Okay, well again, RAM type doesn't dictate how much memory applications are allowed to get.

Also there are LGA775 boards that support a total of 8GB (I had one) so I don't know where this 4GB limitation is coming from.

 

[lvt]

Also there are LGA775 boards that support a total of 8GB (I had one) so I don't know where this 4GB limitation is coming from.

The earlier 775 with G31 chipset only support 2 x 2GB DDR2 RAM.

 

[Titanion]

I didn't really think it was a Phenom. An illusion. But I skipped that generation of AMD hardware, so this is fun to play with now. It is a DDR2 motherboard. I have several 2GB sticks, and it is running 2x4=8.

I do have one 775 motherboard with DDR3, but it has only 2 slots of DDR3 and 2 slots of DDR2.

I will see what 3dmark Vantage looks like with these two builds, unless that was one that wouldn't run on Windows 10.

I could try the current version, but it was not build for this hardware.

I likely will not try to play anything newer than 2015 on these machines.

It is nice to know that this CPU should be outperforming the q6600, but it is not with 3DMark03. I put a 5850 in it and still got ~42K.

 

[SamirD]

It is nice to know that this CPU should be outperforming the q6600, but it is not with 3DMark03. I put a 5850 in it and still got ~42K.

I think it's time to switch teams on the gpu and see what happens. The 3x you've tried should have moved the mark from 42k.

 

[Titanion]

All you did was turn it into an Athlon II X4 650.

And I was wondering about that. I actually have a Athlon II X4 640 3GHz that I got stable at 3.5 Ghz. So I am like X4 at 3.5 or X3 at 3.7 Ghz?

When it outperforms the Q6600 is that controlling for the Q6600 running at 400X9 at 3.6 Ghz?