Hey Guys and Girls ok so i bought a 5970, my Q6600 is bottlenecking it badly So, i've gotten a trade request from someone on Hardwarecanucks for my DSLR Pentax K20D Whats to offer Intel i7 950 3.06Ghz 8MB CPU Asus Rampage III Formula Both have around 2 weeks of usage ( for RMA on his i7 980x ) Never Oc'ed or Gamed So performance wised it beats the Q6600 hands down i know but i want to know your performance with them on your Radeon HD 5970 Screenies of 3d Mark Vantage scores ? Gaming Quality of every single games ? just getting information on this because i need to upgrade mine to get this gaming rig back up to standard but with part time job getting a monster rig back up is hard ! Thanks
what you mean by CPU bottlenecking GPU ? is it like you get CPU 100% while only 50% or less on GPU usage? you should either reinstall your driver or OS and see if you get improvement or not i dont think CPU bottlenecking GPU even how fast it is on CPU side because you OCing your Q6600 @3.4Ghz upgrading to i950 wont be significant imho, despite getting extra thread from hyperthread anyway for price, i950 + asus rampage formula brandnew is like $500 for easy checking, you should check your windows experience index... what your CPU&GPU score on my windows experience index it got i7950 CPU : 7.5 Radeon5850 VGA/GPU : 7.7
I have the 950 on a Formula 3 with 6gb DDR3 1600 Dominator and a 5850 windows experience CPU 7.6 Ram 7.8 graphics 7.7 Gaming graphics 7.7 I came from a q9550 4gb 1066 dddr2 Big difference in games for me
OP your running a monster or a graphics card, basically your running crossfire. Will you see an improvement upgrading from your Q6600 yes you will! As you can tell from my specs im also running crossfire, two 6950's and i found out very quickly that my Q9550 @ 4000Mhz was choking the GPUs in some games, and all benchmarks that i ran. However on the flipside of this, i was getting playable framerates even with my Q9550 @ 4000Mhz holding them back. With the i7 950 Oced to 4151 my framerates shot up. Its down to you really, if your comfy with average framerates then dont bother, if you want more upgrade, if your into benchmarking def upgrade. Otherwise you may aswell sell the 5970 and get a single 6870 or 560 ti or something. No sense in having all that GPU power if its not going to be used i guess
My upgrade from q6600 to core I7 920 doubled the score in every benchmark no matter o.c.ed or not I allready forgot my ex q6600... core i7 920 performs a way better with 5850 crossfire or 5970 Im still satiesfied with it... it can also be easily oc-ed to 3.8 with no voltage changes...
The "Windows Experience" scores mean exactly two things. Jack and squat. The only thing they score is Windows ability to display arbitrary numbers on your screen.
wow people saying massive different going from Q6600 to i7 950 seems people in here all enthusiast my pc history is from 486 ⇒ pentium ⇒ p3 500mhz ⇒ p3 1ghz ⇒ p4 3ghz ⇒ core duo notebook ⇒ Q9550 ⇒ i7 950 i feel much different going from 486 to pentium (as from dos to win3.1)... then p3 to p4 going from p4 to core duo not that significant, maybe because its notebook coreduo core duo to Q9550 ofcourse significant since notebook cpu vs desktop cpu isnt compareable in my definition of signifcant is double power from previous if not my Dell XPS730 (Q9550) mobo broke down, i will still using it until ivy bridge (x68 chipset) next year i am not doing many benchmark as for me getting stable framerate @60fps is all good so based my experince from Q9550 to i7 950 ... didn't feel much ... all desktop performance feel same... it give me faster 3D rendering just by few secs in games, indeed it giving few more fps, but rather pushing fps that makes gpu hot, i prefer stable fps from my ff14 benchmark High Low 4017 6207 Radeon HD5850 win7(64bit) Intel i7 950 @3.06GHz 6GB 3721 4236 Radeon HD5850 win7(64bit) Intel Core2 Quad @2.83GHz (Q9550) 4.00GB it improve but still give me the result for High/1080p at [3000-4499] Fairly High Performance range rather than moving to [4500-5499] High Performance same from windows experience index, Q9550 on stock get 7.2 to i7 950 = 7.5 apologize for long babbling, just want to share my thought (´∇｀)
For CFX and SLI users, it has been proven that a core i5/i7 or modern AMD system upgrade improves performance A LOT over the older P45 architecture. The issue is not the CPU on a clock to clock basis but the limitation of the motherboard's Front Side Bus. AMD systems has hyper transport which is way faster than FSB. Intel now has QPI on Core I5/I7 which is also faster than FSB. For single card users, if your P45 systems are highly overclocked already, especially the FSB, you may not notice a "big" difference.
i agree i7 does help alot. I had Q6600 then i got my 2 5850 xfired and it chugged, like max 60 fps in bfbc2. i when and got a 930 with a ud7 and bam like 100 to 120. i tried everything with my old q6600 new mobo as old one was pci 4 times by 4 times with xfire when to mobo with 8 times 8 times new ram psu. nothing helped. Know with the x58 mobos u get 16 times 16 times and the i7 9 series chips have 32 pci lanes just for that reason the i7 8 and 5 chips only have 8 by 8 i dont know if that would even make a diff most people i talked to said it wouldnt and 1 5970 only has 16 pci lanes. Id put my money on a 950 with a ud5 or ud7 or something around those levels with 6 gig of 1600 dont waste your money on 2000 stuff as it it 1600 overclocked any way.
Going from a Q6600 to an i7 920 or 950 may be worth it but its not worth the upgrade for me, the owner of this score http://3dmark.com/3dm11/7124 has an i7 920(stock) and 2 5970`s and only scored P6500 in 3dmark 2011,for a worth while upgrade i`d need to spend £600+ just on mobo and cpu,my current cpu/mobo/ddr3 cost less than£360,and cpu is almost 2 yrs old now
