Q8300. How important is ram speed? And other questions.

[beastykato]

I was gifted a Q8300 and I'd like to give it to my son so he can have his own dedicated system to play some games on.

I plan on just buying a him a cheap $100-125 RX550 or RX560. I think this CPU should be able to feed one of those ok without a bottleneck correct?

Also, it has 2gb of DDR2 800. I need to get him some more ram and the motherboard supports up to ddr2 1200. How much benefit will I see by upping the ram to 1200? Will it be worth it or should I just buy him a couple more sticks of ddr2 800?

I assume this will be able to run most modern titles decently at low to medium settings? I'm an AMD boy and I really don't even know or remember how these core2quads performed. It was an easy o/c to 3.0ghz on the stock intel cooler. How high do these typically go on stock voltage?

Thanks in advance!

EDIT: Made an error on the ram it's DDR 2 not DDR 3. I saw FSB 1600 OC on the mobo, but it says 1200 oc on ram. Edited post to correct.

 

[ZGR]

Not worth it. The cpu is so slow that it is just a waste of money.

 

[Ranulf]

Define "most modern titles". Anything after 2013 might have problems. It is not worth getting the faster ram unless it is the same price. The rx550/60 is probably overkill but you can always carry it over to a new cpu later on.

 

[beastykato]

I guess these things are lot slower than I thought. It was free so I'm not gonna complain that's for sure.

He plays Minecraft, Witcher 3, Overwatch, lots of various steam titles and e-sports stuff.

I wasn't looking for anything crazy. I thought it would be ok for 720p 30+ fps.

 

[Headfoot]

Yeah it will still function but it really is a lot slower than you'd think, I would definitely not invest much in that platform. It's way cheaper to go online and buy something like a used Thinkstation S30 off of ebay for $300 that has everything you need except the video card on Sandy or Ivy bridge era Xeons

 

[beastykato]

Well thanks for the help guys. I did some research on youtube and it looks like this will play games fine.

I watched quite a few video reviews and even this one here with the Q8300 @ stock clocks : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94kkDLOPqpc&t=132s shows this running with a GT1030 on the new COD:WWII. The GT1030 is definitely bottlenecked by the CPU though, but it stays at a consistent 30-50fps the whole video. So, I went looking for something cheaper.

I got 4gb of ddr2 ram ($20) and a GT730 with GDDR5 ($34.53). For a <$60 computer I think this thing will run fine. After watching videos I'm really surprised just how well these cheap GPU's run modern games.

 

[Arshad Hussain]

You can buy any of the following RX550/RX560 or you can even opt for 1050 card, any one of them will work with your processor.

 

[SandInMyShoes]

I'm still gaming on an LGA775 system with 8gb of DDR2-800, and an overclocked HD6850 GPU, at 1280x800 on the newer games. My CPU is an E5450 overclocked to 3.6ghz (picked it up for just $15 on ebay!), so it doesn't get much better than this on LGA775. Note it requires a little bit of mobo modding and a pin adapter to run an E5450 in LGA775.

I find I'm very CPU-limited for modern gaming. The first modern game I couldn't play well was ARK, but that game was a mess in Early Access anyway. Lately I've been playing PUBG, and it's... kinda playable. It rarely if ever breaks 50fps, and drops down to around 20fps at the times that matter most. It's just not a great experience. At this point I believe I'm CPU-limited, because I've found Youtube videos of guys running PUBG with a similar CPU and GTX 1070s/GTX 1080s, and they're getting about the same frame rates I am.

I don't know the answer to your RAM speed question, sorry. Core 2 architecture seem to share some of the same aspects that make Ryzen sensitive to RAM speed. I'm tempted to upgrade to DDR2-1333 to find out, but ultimately I know it won't make enough of a difference to satisfy me, so it's just throwing good money after bad.

PUBG is my main data point, and it may be more demanding than the games he's wanting to play. After my experience with it, though, I'm not dumping money into any recent AAA games until I have a more modern CPU. Besides, I still have a Steam library full of unplayed games from a decade ago that run just fine!

 

[Fanatical Meat]

I’m running a Q9650 which is from the same era as yours and it still Games acceptably.
However I don’t run many shooters these days.
I agree with the above poster a gtx 1050 should suit it well, max out the memory with whatever is the cheapest sticks you can find. I have no idea of what ddr2 runs today, I will say if its over $150 you should think about a refurb PC with a newer chip. I've seen i5's with 4GB for as low as $140.

 

[LightningZ71]

I run a Q8400 with 16GB of DDR3, and SSD and a GT 630 2GB DDR3 card. I manage to run a lot of MMO and steam games on it well enough to be enjoyable. I don't go past 720p and I keep the detail levels scaled down for sure, but, I'm constantly in the 45-60 fps range for most of them. It's absolutely not the fastest thing on the block, but, its a decent system that serves a casual gamer well enough.