Quote:
Originally Posted by PsYcNeT
I very much beg to differ. The e8500 (in an Asus P5N-D) I swapped out of my wife's PC was overclocked to 4.0 on air (yes it was loud), and was literally getting 25-30 fps @ 1680x1050 in most modern games with a 570. Switching to a modern mainboard, a modern CPU and DDR3 had such an intense change to the overall effectiveness of the videocard it can't be understated. This goes double for games that are more CPU intensive like MMOs and Civ 5 (or Sim City upcoming).
This is also keeping in mind that an e8500 (esp at a 4.0 OC) has better gaming performance than a q6600. http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/53?vs=55
Hell, look at the FPS differences between a q6600 at stock (worse for OCing) to a 2500k at stock (can OC up to 4.5 without breaking a sweat). http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/53?vs=288
It's almost a 50% difference with the same hardware other than the CPUs, and those tests were done at stock speeds with a GTX 280, which certainly has much less bandwidth than a modern GPU. |
The Anandtech games are using old games that don't take advantage of more than two cores (if even one!). That was from back in the era when people were still giving out the advice to stick to dual core CPUs because quad cores made no difference in gaming. It's the other way around these days...BF3 is a good example of that.
I own a Q6600, E8400 (and a dozen more s775 CPUs), and several 2500Ks (all doing about 5GHz). If I was still on my Q6600 and never went to a 2500K, I honestly would still be happy with the performance with the overclocked Q6600, especially if the budget is important.
In my testing with the Q6600 @ 3.6GHz, e8400 at 3.8GHz, and 2500K at 5.0GHz, the Q6600 beat the E8400 and gave a comparable experience to a stock 2500K in modern games that utilize multiple cores well. In ancient games, the Q6600 doesn't shine as much. I doubt he's playing ancient games. These experiments were done with a single ATI 5870 back then. I wouldn't recommend anything more powerful than that with an overclocked Q6600. When I added an additional 5870 in Crossfire, the Q6600 did bottleneck. A single 5870 however is already twice as powerful as his 8800 Ultra.
Overclocking + small investment in mid-range card = $150-$200 cost.
Throwing out entire system because the old architecture isn't good enough = $1000 cost
That said, if you are going for a dual card setup or higher end modern card, the CPU would still be a bottleneck but the point is that a Q6600 still has plenty of life left in it for gaming and especially with modern games that more effectively use multiple cores, it's still a damn good CPU.
You could buy a higher end GPU, pair it with an overclocked Q6600 and be a happy gamer for quite some time. Then later on when you have more funds, you could build a new rig and carry the GPU over.
That's just my opinion from a budget-minded and non-wasting good hardware point of view. That said, if you have the $$$ today, upgrading to a modern CPU and motherboard would be awesome too.
Ultimately, the overclocking option is a free option you can try right now to see if it gets you to a level where you don't have to throw out the old system and spend $1000. The rest is up to you but I honestly think that an OC'd Q6600 plus a midrange card that is about twice the speed of the 8800 Ultra would be fine.