Hi there, this is not for my system it's for a friends. He currently has an E8400 on an Intel G41 chipset motherboard. The Motherboard won't go past 340 FSB so the maximum overclock he can achieve on the E8400 is 3.06Ghz. I was thinking if I got him a E7600 which has a higher multi and lower FSB he could achieve a much better overclock: aprox 3.9GHZ at his motherboard's maximum fsb of 340. only snag is the E7600 only has 3MB cache vs 6MB on the E8400 and I know cache is important to games. Will the extra overclock of the E7600@3.9GHz be better than the E8400@3.06GHz with more cache in games like Skyrim and StarCraft II? He doesn't have the money for any upgrades right now so changing motherboard and going i7, i5 is off the cards. He currently has a GTX 460 and games at 1600x900 so is very CPU limited. Edit: Or how about a Pentium E5800 with it's 16X Multi? Sky's the limit with that processor but even less cache, only 2MB.
man, men ther no answer to this all program different. e8400 and OC as much as u can sqweese out of it wil be best for you! best procesor there!
Anyone else have any ideas. Basically all I'm saying is what's better an E8400 @ 3.0GHz or a E7600 @ 3.9GHz. I'm pretty sure most applications would be faster on the E7600 myself. Just I'm not sure how cache affects modern games and applications. Also does anyone have any experience overclocking on the G41 chipset? Will I be able to get the E7600 to 3.9GHz?
I've just ran SuperPi Mod 1.5 on my E8500. I ran it at 333mhz FSB with 9x multi (effectively an E8400) and got a 1M calculation time of 15.719 seconds. Looking at this: http://www.overclock.net/t/55790/official-superpi-1m-top-times/0_20 I see a E7500 running at 3.8GHz achieved a 1M time of 14.336 seconds. So from this can I assume that a E7600 @ 3.9GHz will perform better than a E8400 @ 3.0Ghz? P.S Just for funsies I ran my E8500 at it's usual 3.8GHz overclock and it achieved a 1M time of 13.125 seconds. My Q9650 @ 4GHs got there in 11.737 seconds.
What games is he playing? I'm still using an E6850 with a GTX 470, and most games play just fine at 1920x1200. I'd go for the E7600 @ 3.9GHz.
He's only just getting into PC gaming again after a long stint with console gaming so he has lots to catch up on: StarCraft 2, Skyrim, Crysis, FarCry 2 + 3 (if it will run). Basically any good games released in the last 8 years. He's a big StarCraft fan though. He and I still play brood war on LAN every Thursday!
I've thought of that but those board are surprisingly expensive. I can't seem to find one for any less than £80.
Tell him to stick with what he has and do a full upgrade somewhere down the line. No amount of overclocking is going to come anywhere near unbottlenecking that GPU. Spending any money to get an even older CPU just so you can get an extra 900mhz over the other one is silly.
It is a bit of a silly idea I know. If he had the money I would get a cheep 1155 mobo and a cheep i3/i5 for him. Funnily enough the E7600 is actually newer than the E8400 (May 2009 vs January 2008). I can get one for £20 so it's not exactly going to break the bank. I tell you the difference on my E8500 + GTX460 from 3GHz to 3.8Ghz is night and day in games. I was doing some experiments to see how his system would run things and at 3GHz skyrim on maximum settings was running around 35 FPS minimum in CPU intensive areas which is not nice as you get stutter and lag from vsync all the time. Clocked at 3.8 it's around 45 FPS minimum much less stutter generally feels smother and better all round.
Let me put it this way. I had a E7600, still use it in another computer actually. And it bottlenecks the crap out of the GTX 260 core 216 it's with.
I have an ASUS P5K Premium gathering dust somewhere. You can have it if you like. It does need a new BIOS chip as I accidentally updated the BIOS with my overclock settings still enabled and was unable to get the board to post again. I am sure everything on it is still fine but needs the BIOS chip replacing.
What about going for a C2Q? There are cheap Xeons that are identical to C2Qs. Here are a few: http://www.ebay.com/itm/INTEL-XEON-...SOR-/331145755697?pt=CPUs&hash=item4d19d33c31 http://www.ebay.com/itm/Intel-Xeon-...B69-/131131590326?pt=CPUs&hash=item1e880d46b6 The top one has a higher multi, lower FSB and 8MB L3. Should be able to get a good OC on it. The second is newer, has 6MB L3 and you'll get the same 3.06ghz OC on it. The only difference past the L3 and clocks is the newer one has SSE4 support, which AFAIK should only effect video encodes and editing. I have the X3320 with a 3.0ghz OC, it runs great.
I would definately try and get a quad core, when I upgraded from a pentium E5200 @3.75ghz to a core2quad Q6600 @3.2 it made a huge difference to most recent games, even with a lowly Radeon HD 5750 holding it back. Some of that could be down to having 4 times the cache but a lot of games now are using more than 2 cores. The biggest problem is the price, C2Qs still go for a lot more than you would expect and you will be lucky if you could find a G0 stepping Q6600 for less than £40 on ebay, I was lucky and somebody gave me one although it was only a B3, i did get 3.6ghz out of it but it got way too hot and sucked too much power to live with 24/7 so settled for 3.2ghz. If you're sticking with dual core, I think I remember reading in reviews of the E7200 back in 2008 that the cache didn't make as much difference as higher clocks so I bought a E7200 and an ASUS P5Q Pro hoping to get close to 4ghz just as they started shipping batches that wouldn't clock anywhere near as high and I was stuck at 3.4. Sold that system to a mate in 2011 and it's still going strong with xfire HD4850s now.
