Q9550

[WTSherman]

Anybody still using the old Yorkfields? Today I finally upgraded from a Q9550 and ddr2 RAM to an i5 3570k. There is a huge increase in CPU horsepower but it only makes me appreciate the old Q9550 more. I could have used this CPU another few years if ddr2 RAM wasn't so expensive.

It was nice back then when anyone could just buy a cheap CPU and overclock it to 4 Ghz, like the Conroes, the Wolfdales etc. Any ape could buy a $50 Pentium Dual Core and overclock it.

Intel ended up where their customers were having too much fun and shut it down by narrowing our offerings to the higher priced "K" chips, which I resent.

I'm planning on either putting together a second system or selling the Q9550, this thing has been overclocked at 4 ghz for years.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Anybody still using the old Yorkfields? Today I finally upgraded from a Q9550 and ddr2 RAM to an i5 3570k. There is a huge increase in CPU horsepower but it only makes me appreciate the old Q9550 more. I could have used this CPU another few years if ddr2 RAM wasn't so expensive.

It was nice back then when anyone could just buy a cheap CPU and overclock it to 4 Ghz, like the Conroes, the Wolfdales etc. Any ape could buy a $50 Pentium Dual Core and overclock it.

Intel ended up where their customers were having too much fun and shut it down by narrowing our offerings to the higher priced "K" chips, which I resent.

I'm planning on either putting together a second system or selling the Q9550, this thing has been overclocked at 4 ghz for years.

I've actually got four Wolfdale systems still in the house: a server box, a cast-off I use for my realty rental bidnis, and one each for the remaining family members who are still just happier than pigs in s*** with them.

But your frustrations are widespread among many. They've focused their efforts on reducing the lithography to keep up the speed, while lowering the power requirement. With that, anyone could deduce that they're looking at the mobile device market, less concerned about us desktop enthusiasts.

 

[tweakboy]

Sell the CPU and do your desired OC. What video card do you have ?

 

[VirtualLarry]

I'm still rocking a Q9300, and am building a couple of E3300 mini-ITX rigs.

 

[SlowSpyder]

I upgraded from an overclocked Phenom II not because I had to, but just to build another computer, it had been a while.

 

[psolord]

My tertiary rig is a Q9550@4Ghz. Still runs fine and especially in games that can use all four cores.

The trouble starts when you try to run something like AC4 which really loves my primary's IPC. On the Q9550 you'd be lucky if you get around 30fps. My 5850s are cpu limited in such cases.

Thankfully multi core programming in games have taken off in recent years, so the cpu has actually gotten better over time.

In terms of everyday use, it rocks. I can barely distinguish it from my other systems.

Sadly the time has come to sell it.

 

[Qbah]

Still rocking my Q9450 with a mild OC Was planning to upgrade to Haswell, but then again I don't play that much these days and the Yorkfield plays Borderlands 2 just fine And my backlog will not need an upgrade to the CPU anyway... maybe Broadwell will sway me to upgrade, who knows...

 

[ChronoReverse]

My Q9450 worked quite well but BF4 brought it to its knees. With the same video card but a 4770k, I got double framerates easily.

 

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

My brother recently got my Q9650 system. The only thing it needs is a quiet GPU. There is an old AMD card in there. An AMD X1900XTX. A 0db GPU and some quieter case fans and that thing will be set! It's got some low timing mem sticks 8g total, a nice SSD, and a fanless Seasonic 400w something PSU.

 

[ZipSpeed]

My Q9550 (my first quad core) is now crunching World Community Grid projects 24/7 for the last couple years. Still going strong with nary a whimper.

 

[NTMBK]

The Phenom II in my rig still feels fast. Shame that the motherboard it's in is a piece of crap...

 

[coolpurplefan]

My Q9450 worked quite well but BF4 brought it to its knees. With the same video card but a 4770k, I got double framerates easily.

Thanks for the encouraging words. Reading the first post, I was wondering whether upgrading from a Core2Duo E8500 with 1066MHz RaM was worth it.

I'm planning to upgrade to a socket 1150 quad core because I used that E8500 to render a 2 and a half hour recording of the Olympic closing ceremonies. The Camtasia 7 camrec file was 131 GB (at 30fps) and it took over 6 hours to convert the file to a video. I'm hoping a quad core with 1600MHz RAM will take much less time. (Actually, I might do research on a better way to save videos as well. Talk about time consuming.)

 

[videogames101]

still have my old q9550 in a media PC after it was retired for ivy bridge, the thing is a beast and still churns through most tasks

 

[escrow4]

Thanks for the encouraging words. Reading the first post, I was wondering whether upgrading from a Core2Duo E8500 with 1066MHz RaM was worth it.

I'm planning to upgrade to a socket 1150 quad core because I used that E8500 to render a 2 and a half hour recording of the Olympic closing ceremonies. The Camtasia 7 camrec file was 131 GB (at 30fps) and it took over 6 hours to convert the file to a video. I'm hoping a quad core with 1600MHz RAM will take much less time. (Actually, I might do research on a better way to save videos as well. Talk about time consuming.)

My 4770 ripped through a 3GB .ts in under 20min in Handbrake @ MP/L3.0 down to around 1.3GB or so. I can all but guarantee that encoding time will drop down to an hour or less with a 4770.

 

[Gikaseixas]

Good memories of my trusty Q9550, sold it because I got a great offer. It was originally matched with a GTX 280 and 4GB of ram but received some love a year later by getting a HD5870 and extra 4GB to make 8 in total. Was a fast enough PC

 

[Soulkeeper]

I miss my Q9450 performance in many things.

I upgraded from it to a llano quad core.
clock for clock the Q9450 still beats it by a bit in most things.
The llano needs an extra 100-300MHz to match it.
The yorkfields' 12MB of L2 was just excellent. Things like compiling code, or dealing with large amounts of data were at home.
The only reason I did the upgrade at the time was for the lower power usage ie: going from 100+ watt to ~60W idle. Also, I guess I just like trying new things.
I do miss the big L2 cache chips.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I miss my Q9450 performance in many things.
The yorkfields' 12MB of L2 was just excellent. Things like compiling code, or dealing with large amounts of data were at home.
The only reason I did the upgrade at the time was for the lower power usage ie: going from 100+ watt to ~60W idle. Also, I guess I just like trying new things.
I do miss the big L2 cache chips.

Arguably, the only reason that they benefited from large L2 was the FSB (and thus RAM) bottleneck.

I've run some multi-core distributed-computing apps that were RAM B/W starved on Core2Quad chips.

 

[Gikaseixas]

The llano needs an extra 100-300MHz to match it.

My A8 3850 was never a match for my 9550, even running @3.3
That's how good the Core 2 was and still is. AMD needs a brand new big core arch and so far there are no indications of that happening

 

[ch33zw1z]

I'm still running a Q9550, 8gb ddr2, on a p5k vanilla. It's the "everything" box, except HTPC...

 

[Schmide]

I have a q9550 that I just rebuilt as a test machine. Some hardware you just keep for whatever reasons.

 

[coolpurplefan]

I have a q9550 that I just rebuilt as a test machine. Some hardware you just keep for whatever reasons.

I'd like to keep my socket 754 motherboard/CPU/heatsink/RAM and Geforce 6600 GT but now that XP won't get anymore updates, I may end up selling it. I thought the modifications I did for these things were cool though. I installed a heatpipe cooler on the 6600 GT, a Scythe miniNinja heatpipe cooler on the CPU and even a Zalman passive radiator on the motherboard. I even took the time to lap (or sand) the heatsink that went on the video card (even if I don't overclock). It seems a little difficult to sell something just because it's not compatible with newer OSes.