Will I feel a difference between E5400 and E8600 CPU?

[Foomate]

Trying to revive an old PC.
I know it's really old but I need that PC, so I wanted to know if there will be a noticeable performance gain if I upgrade the Pentium E5400 with Core 2 Duo E8600 or even E8400 / E8500?
Thanks

 

[nzalog]

Probably not a huge difference. If you're not already on an SSD that would give you a nice boost.

 

[boosted1g]

Difference doing what?

Running 10 year old games and programs that were "demadning" 10 years ago....yeah it will make a difference.

Running a modern game or other modern demanding task. No. You are going from 8% to 20% which is still grossly insufficient.

 

[Foomate]

It's mainly for browsing the web.
So if I still want that 8 to 20% upgrade, should I stick to E8400, or you suggest other CPU for the LGA775 that would do better (not too expensive obviously, as the E8400 is around 7$)

And I am planning on upgrading to an SSD, and the motherboard is SATA 2 only, so I guess any SSD will do?
If I plan to upgrade to SSD maybe I can skip the CPU upgrade?

 

[nzalog]

For 7$ go I'd go ahead and move to the e8400.

The SSD doesn't matter too much. You're mostly benefitting from the quick access times of an SSD vs an HDD and not the total throughput.

 

[boosted1g]

As nzalog said for $7 you might as well.

If you can find an inexepensive core2quad then that would be better. You need to lookup your motherboard to see what it supports though.

With SSD it is the seek speed and not the max bus speed that will show more improvement so different brands of SSD can still make a difference.
Out of the new generation budget drives that use the Toshiba TLC chips (Sandisk Plus, Kingston uv400/hyper, pny c1311, ADATA and OCZ) the best of the bunch is the PNY C1311. If you can find an older Sandisk Ultimate for a good price, that is actually better then the newer generation models.

 

[Foomate]

Thanks guys!
But is there any need for 4 cores in web browsing? Is there a use of all these core when only doing that? Because the quad cores are clocked much lower so I just wonder if an E8400 @3.0 GHz might do better than a Q9300 @ 2.5GHz.
Also, I have the Arctic Alpine 11 Pro Rev 2 which is rated to deal with TDP of up to 95W, with recommended TDP of 85W, and the quads are 95W, while the E8400 is 65W.
So you think the Arctic alpine can deal with quad although it's recommended to 85w TDP? (You can see in their website if you look for Arctic Alpine 11)

 

[nzalog]

Thanks guys!
But is there any need for 4 cores in web browsing? Is there a use of all these core when only doing that? Because the quad cores are clocked much lower so I just wonder if an E8400 @3.0 GHz might do better than a Q9300 @ 2.5GHz.
Also, I have the Arctic Alpine 11 Pro Rev 2 which is rated to deal with TDP of up to 95W, with recommended TDP of 85W, and the quads are 95W, while the E8400 is 65W.
So you think the Arctic alpine can deal with quad although it's recommended to 85w TDP? (You can see in their website if you look for Arctic Alpine 11)

You're probably right, two faster clocked dual cores are probably going to work better for web browsing.

 

[boosted1g]

Thanks guys!
But is there any need for 4 cores in web browsing? Is there a use of all these core when only doing that? Because the quad cores are clocked much lower so I just wonder if an E8400 @3.0 GHz might do better than a Q9300 @ 2.5GHz.
Also, I have the Arctic Alpine 11 Pro Rev 2 which is rated to deal with TDP of up to 95W, with recommended TDP of 85W, and the quads are 95W, while the E8400 is 65W.
So you think the Arctic alpine can deal with quad although it's recommended to 85w TDP? (You can see in their website if you look for Arctic Alpine 11)

Good on you on the research.

You are right that 2 faster cores for simple tasks would be better.
For normal use, not gaming or overclocking, that cooler would likely still be fine for a 95w tdp cpu, now whether your motherboard supports 95w is a whole different factor.

 

[Foomate]

Yep I checked for my motherboard support and it does support all the quads, however, I ended up buying the E8500, it only costs 7$, and the difference between it and the E8600 will be subtle. I also think that since the E8500 is 65w, I can clock is easier on air to about 3.6Ghz instead of its stock 3.16.. What do you think?
Now what's left to check is whether there's an actual difference between the E8500 and the E5400
Oh and I also bought SanDisk SSD Plus as you suggested, lets see if I can revive that old machine

 

[dontlistentome]

I 'revived' an old computer. I added 4gb ram, to go from 4 to 8. I added a small, 120gb SSD, to function as main OS and programs drive with a mechanical hard driver for everything else. It made a huge difference. Now the computer boots up to desktop very fast. Programs start very fast. In my web browser I used to have to close tabs at a certain point if I wanted to open new ones because the computer would get sluggish. Now I can have a totally ridiculous number of tabs open in multiple browsers(Opera, Firefox, Vivaldi) and the computer stays responsive at all times.

So I think you're going to be happy with all this once you're done.