bing increase in perfomance from q6600 to q9450?

S

Sanada

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Nov 18, 2003
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I just got a q6600 but im thinking about returning it and upgrading it to a q9450, but was wondering if the perfomance increase would be that big of a deal? Or should I just wait until next years 2nd generation i7s?
 
If he says Crysis, we gang up on him.

In theory though, as I understand it, you don't get a massive across-the-board performance shift until you go to the Q9550 (which I'm waiting on now to replace my Q6600). The Q9450 is a bit more modest, but still a bump up. There are still some unanswered questions (expected resolution, GPU, blah blah blah...) that he'll have to answer first, too...
 
opps sorry I meant the Q9550 not the Q9450, dont know why I put that there.

But yea performance in gaming and applications like photoshop (working with hundreds of layers and huge pictures) and some music converting
 
In photoshop probably. I'm trying to decide if i should hold on to my q6600 that runs 3.6ghz daily or pick up a new E0 9560 :p I have absolutely no reason to upgrade, but i still want to.
 
exactly veedubfreak, my current system handles everything perfectly so I really have no need to upgrade, but just reading info about the Q9550 makes me want to get one.
 
The Q9550 at stock appears to basically perform as well as a QX6850, and that's a healthy bump up from a stock Q6600--but when you throw overclocking into the mix it all goes to hell. :)
 
Ya, i have a REALLY good q6600. I've had it stable as high as 4ghz, but it takes 1.6v to get there which isnt good for my power bill. I'm afraid to roll the dice on a chip that doesnt overclock for crap.
 
here is my o/c from stock to 3.4


Stock

2.66/1333/1.075v which my mobo set it to 1.25v


now my o/c

we'll here is my Q9450 o/c

3.4/1700/1.275v

Idea Temps

Core0 37 Core1 37 Core2 41 Core3 41

Load Temps

Core0 47 Core1 47 Core2 51 Core3 51

Cpu Cooler Zalman 9700 Ran prime 95 stable as can be ran it for 10 hours.

but your mileage may very.
 
Re- photoshop
i would probably say not to bother with that upgrade yet, until you try some other things.

In photoshop im sure you have done all the tweaks like reduce the amount of history levels to what you are comfortable with (thats the hugest boost you can do).

The best thing you could do is get a really fast hard drive and use it for a scratch disk(and not windows or windows swap file, or where you keep your work). no matter what you do, with a big image with lots of layers and history its going to use the scratch disk. so the faster it is the better.

of course actual processing of filters will be faster with a faster CPU but that amount of time pales in comparison to the interface being slow when just doing general work because of swapping to the scratch disk.

If you have 32 bit windows and 2GB upgrade to 4GB even if windows 32 can only use 3 - 3.5 GB its really cheap now.
if you are running on 64 bit windows then get 8GB and let photoshop use 100% in its settings (it will only use 3GB anyways, then u have plenty left for everything else)

with photoshop and other apps at the same time its still better to use XP64 even if photoshop is 32 bit, because photoshop can hog all of its memory and there is still plenty left for other apps, with 32 bit + photoshop (and 3 - 3.5 GB) windows and other programs will want to swap in and out when you switch between apps.

unfortunately photoshop wont be 64 bit till CS4 (and CS5 for mac lol)

Helping people with photoshop and 3ds MAX on XP64 is a part of my job BTW.
 
I wouldn't do it. Core i7 is right around the corner and judging by your passion for upgrading when you said yourself you have no reason to, the 9550 will be short lived in your system. Hang on to the Q6600 and feed your need to upgrade when Core i7 is out. Thats my 2 cents.
 
I agree w/ RamonGTP, wait for i7 if you want to see a big boost in Photoshop and other CPU intensive apps.
 
veedubfreak said:
Ya, i have a REALLY good q6600. I've had it stable as high as 4ghz, but it takes 1.6v to get there which isnt good for my power bill. I'm afraid to roll the dice on a chip that doesnt overclock for crap.
Click to expand...

Let's be realistic. .2v won't do anything to your power bill.
 
Dan_D said:
Let's be realistic. .2v won't do anything to your power bill.
Click to expand...

Exactly what I was thinking... but then I'm not familiar with current intel chips and overclocking so I thought he might've disabled some power saving features with the voltage increase for better stability.
 
I'm going to assume you are talking about running stock speeds. For the most part, I doubt you would see a huge boost in performance out of any software that isn't SSE4 optimized. The clockspeed is about 433mhz higher and in some cases that will make a difference, but I don't know if it would be worth the price difference.

I don't currently use any software on a regular basis which has SSE4 optimizations and probably won't for a long time so that is not something which would be a selling point to me. I also overclock the hell out of my systems so the stock speed means nothing to me. However, I would prefer to have a processor with a 9x multiplier at minimum (like my Q6600) to maximize my overclock so the Q9550 doesn't really appeal to me on that basis. If I couldn't get a higher clockspeed than my current 3.6Ghz, it would not be worth spending any money on a processor upgrade as the IPC increases would not justify the extra money spent.

To each their own, but you need to look at whether the differences in the CPUs is worth the extra money.

 
dont bother. the thing about larger l2 cache giving better gaming performance has been disproved now in several places. like the other guy said, 0.2v is not going to make or break you. but if you really want this cpu, nothing we say is going to stop you. you may get one of the 45nm cpus that has extremely high temps, even at default. my q9450 was one of those. 44c at idle with a xig hs/f at default vcore. i was not impressed with the 45nm quads.
 
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