Any reason to upgrade from a Q9550 yet?

[GreenMeters]

Getting ready to move, which got me thinking about shrinking my beastly P180 ATX machine down to a more manageable TJ08-E or similar mATX, which got me researching current generation parts. Just recently upgraded to a GTX 960 and an 850 EVO 1 TB, so this would just be a mobo/CPU/RAM upgrade.

But reading Skylake reviews, neither it nor DDR4 look like particularly compelling upgrades at this point, at least for an office work/programming/discrete GPU gaming machine and at the price points Skylake is presently demanding. And it seems silly to upgrade to a Haswell or Broadwell generation when those sockets are already obsoleted.

Am I underestimating the difference a modern CPU would make compared to a Q9550? Or is this really just not the time to upgrade from a formerly high-end CPU, even if it is 7 years old at this point?

 

[Prey2big]

You will enjoy double the frame rate in many games. In terms of actual gaming experience I dare say it will feel more than twice as good in many games, if it is possible to quantify that.

 

[Burpo]

Plenty of reasons to upgrade, and Skylake is proving to be formidable, but the choice is yours as to whether you want the latest/greatest. There are plenty of cheaper options available.

 

[sm625]

Even my lowly G3258 absolutely trounces a Q9550. If you bought a skylake you would be amazed at how much faster it is. The latency of FSB operations alone is enough reason to upgrade. But with skylake you'd also be getting several generations of IPC enhancements as well as significantly lower memory latency and higher bandwidth.

 

[AtenRa]

Most of today games will be GPU limited with the GTX960.
Only MMORGs and some RTS will see a nice performance boost, the rest will not.

 

[Yuriman]

I found my Ivy Bridge i5 (4 generations old at this point) was around twice as fast as the overclocked Q6600 I came from. Power consumption at idle dropped by around 75-85% for the whole system, and I was able to stuff it into a case that was 1/5 the size while also generating a fraction of the noise.

Worth it? I'd say so.

You'll probably find a Skylake i3 to be around twice as fast in most cases, possibly more in those loads that use instructions that your CPU lacks (e.g. AVX). An i5 or i7 will be overkill for light gaming and office-work machine, but the power consumption/noise/size improvements will still be there.

 

[ShintaiDK]

I would say an upgrade is overdue. But that's my view.

 

[frozentundra123456]

Not sure what you mean by the "price points skylake is at". It is priced pretty much like the previous generations. And you never really get a deal on older generations from intel. They just get discontinued. The only way you could save on Haswell vs Skylake is if you have DDR3 that you could re-use instead of having to buy DDR4.

Is it worth it to upgrade? As others said, you would see a good boost in games especially. Yes, you will be gpu limited in a lot of games with a 960, but I think it is still worth it. Heck, if you are just a light gamer, even a Skylake i3 would be a match for that 960, although I would go with a quad if you intend to upgrade the gpu and play demanding titles.

Granted, you have an ssd and a faster Core 2 quad, but a couple of years ago, I upgraded from an E4500 to a sandy bridge i5, and was amazed at how much snappier the system felt in everyday use, not to mention gaming. I actually upgraded for gaming purposes, but was amazed at how much snappier the system felt in day to day use.

Just my experience. YMMV, especially since you already have an SSD.

 

[dark zero]

There are a LOT of reasons, but it's hella expensive due the novelty factor (and good DDR4).

Better wait to Skylake with Iris Pro iGPU and you can even sell that 960 who won't be useful by that moment or use together thanks to DX12. Current CPUs are great, but the ones with Iris Pro, despite the cost are worthier than the rest thanks to edRAM

Or you can wait to Kabylake too and in their version with Iris Pro, you won't need to get any dGPU who aren't a high Tier (nVIDIA GTX 980 or similar) due the improvement they announced.

 

[Erithan13]

For light use (web surfing, basic office tasks) the performance of Core 2 is still perfectly fine although it must be said you can get the same raw processing power using far less electrical power/heat with modern chips. But when it comes to anything remotely heavy even the best of the Core2s are utterly destroyed by modern i3s and even the lowliest pentiums and celerons are so many generations advanced that they still come up on top for barely any money.

There's a really good article by techspot here which compares almost 10 years of Intel cpus to give you some idea of how far we've come since 2006/2007 era performance. The gaming benchmarks were done on a 980 but if you're GPU limited you can always turn down settings or drop the resolution whereas there's not much you can do about CPU bottlenecks:



Granted that's one of the worse disparities between the Core2s and the modern chips on a CPU heavy game but it certainly shows the point. You can find the odd slightly older game that can be coaxed to run alright on Core2s, Unreal Engine 3 shooters like Bioshock Infinite seem to be particularly decent (but not outstanding) on older systems.

So, you certainly don't need to jump straight to the expensive i7s for a massive upgrade over your current system. i5 or even i3 Skylake would be a huge benefit for that 960.

 

[master_shake_]

get a cheap 2500k/3570k comboe and be done with it.

sandy/ivy bridge owners still have no reason to upgrade.

 

[frozentundra123456]

Good advice if you trust a used system, and depending on price. Definitely an upgrade from anything SB or newer is debatable, but if upgrading from an older system, I personally would just go all the way to Haswell or Skylake. Probably could save only a hundred or two dollars, and you are getting 10 to 20% less performance and a chip that may have been abused.

 

[happy medium]

Any reason to upgrade from a Q9550 yet?

I just retired my q9550 @ 4.0 desktop to my parents, then used a laptop for a while, and yesterday bought the system in my signature.

I upgraded mostly for the features on the new motherboards and much lower power consumption/heat. It should be a fair performance bump also.

Motherbaord/cpu/ram cost me $405.
I left some room to upgrade my cpu further and gpu in a year or so.

 

[GreenMeters]

Sounds like I am underestimating Skylake's performance... or at least underestimating the cumulative performance increase of the generations since Core 2 Quad.

Should note that I'm exclusively on Linux, so things like DX12 don't matter. Also means I'm generally not playing the very latest titles, though Steam OS has been changing that and I hope it continues. I'd like to get a little more life out of this GTX 960, but I can definitely see going for a mid-high range (i.e., where a 980 would slot today) in a couple generations.

I imagine a CPU upgrade would also help a lot with game recording/streaming, which is something I've started playing around with.

Edit: Also, for CPU I do tend to go high-end and keep it for many years, so likely looking at an i7 or at least an i5. But TDP will be important, too. I like powerful but quiet systems.

 

[GreenMeters]

Oh, one other question: Anandtech and others noted that gaming with Skylake and a dGPU was actually somewhat worse than the previous generation. Did that ever get resolved?

 

[escrow4]

An i3 6100 + Gigabyte H110M-S2H (or Asrock H110M-DGS) would be a default basic all rounder if you don't game much. If you want more ports than H170.

 

[TheELF]

I imagine a CPU upgrade would also help a lot with game recording/streaming, which is something I've started playing around with.

Install geforce experience which will give you shadowplay,you will be able to record through your gpu ,you still loose a few fps in games that max out your graphics but you will be able to do nice recordings straight to h.264 with minimal impact on the cpu.

 

[frozentundra123456]

Oh, one other question: Anandtech and others noted that gaming with Skylake and a dGPU was actually somewhat worse than the previous generation. Did that ever get resolved?

Skylake gets a decent bump in cpu limited gaming with a dgpu if you use fast ram.

 

[Yuriman]

Oh, one other question: Anandtech and others noted that gaming with Skylake and a dGPU was actually somewhat worse than the previous generation. Did that ever get resolved?

Skylake (gen6) is, generally speaking, a more powerful CPU than Broadwell (gen5). The problem is that Broadwell CPUs have more cache, due to their iGPU.

Broadwell desktop CPUs come with Iris Pro iGPUs, with 128MB of edram, which can be used by the CPU portion as well. There are currently no Skylake CPUs you can buy for desktop that include the Iris Pro iGPU and edram, but they'll hit the market eventually.

FWIW, Skylake has lower power consumption, overclocks higher than Broadwell, and has access to DDR4 which can swing things in its favor, depending on the benchmark.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Be a stalwart holdout. Keep using your Q9550. And tell the kids to get off your lawn.

 

[pauldun170]

Getting ready to move, which got me thinking about shrinking my beastly P180 ATX machine down to a more manageable TJ08-E or similar mATX, which got me researching current generation parts. Just recently upgraded to a GTX 960 and an 850 EVO 1 TB, so this would just be a mobo/CPU/RAM upgrade.

But reading Skylake reviews, neither it nor DDR4 look like particularly compelling upgrades at this point, at least for an office work/programming/discrete GPU gaming machine and at the price points Skylake is presently demanding. And it seems silly to upgrade to a Haswell or Broadwell generation when those sockets are already obsoleted.

Am I underestimating the difference a modern CPU would make compared to a Q9550? Or is this really just not the time to upgrade from a formerly high-end CPU, even if it is 7 years old at this point?

I'm typing this post from my Q9550 box with a Sammy 830 and GTX570 (I use a i7-2700K +GTX780 as my primary).

Unless there is a specific app that your current PC can't handle, I'm hesitant to say go for an upgrade. BUT....

From a usage standpoint on newer stuff, single digit boot up times is real nice. Being able to take advantage of M.2 + lots of Sata6 ports is really nice now that SSD's are down to commodity cheapo status.
Another big benefit is cheap memory upgrades.
Games do run a bit smoother. VM's load up quicker.

I think a proper Skylake build with an i5 or i7 would be a very nice, noticeable upgrade over a typical Q9550 setup.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I'm typing this post from my Q9550 box with a Sammy 830 and GTX570 (I use a i7-2700K +GTX780 as my primary).

Unless there is a specific app that your current PC can't handle, I'm hesitant to say go for an upgrade. BUT....

I think a proper Skylake build with an i5 or i7 would be a very nice, noticeable upgrade over a typical Q9550 setup.

I'm sure it would. But would it be worth the money to do so? Skylake stuff, mobos, RAM, CPUs, M.2 PCI-E SSDs, everything Skylake related has a price premium on it right now. Almost better off going Haswell.

 

[Zodiark1593]

I'm sure it would. But would it be worth the money to do so? Skylake stuff, mobos, RAM, CPUs, M.2 PCI-E SSDs, everything Skylake related has a price premium on it right now. Almost better off going Haswell.

I went with an i5-4590 myself after debating whether Skylake would be worthwhile. I'd have gotten more performance/$ by going with a Xeon or i7 with Hyperthreading than getting the Skylake i5 + expensive mobo and DDR4 RAM.

Speaking of which, I do really wish I got that Xeon (or that I even knew about it at purchase). A mere $50 and I'd be rolling hyperthreaded 3.7 GHZ cores ($250 total for Xeon). Not that the i5 is bad by any means, but...

 

[Tecnoworld]

I just upgraded from my old q6600@3.0 to a 5820k@4.4. Incredible jump, but also thx to 16gb vs 4gb, sdd vs hdd, 3x faster dgpu and so forth. Anyway the cpu, per se, is at least 4x faster in benchmarks.

 

[JimmiG]

I upgraded from a Phenom II X4 @ 3.7 GHz to my current CPU a couple of years ago. The difference was absolutely insane, always more than twice as fast in every game and benchmark, even at stock clock speeds. The Q9550 is faster than the Phenom II, but you'd still notice huge improvements with a more modern CPU. Of course it depends somewhat on what you use the system for. If you aren't pushing the Q9550 now, a faster CPU wouldn't make any difference.