Replacing 775 Socket

StopNotWorking

EG Looking for more adventure in my computer life!!

Currently have a Q9550 on an Asus P5Q Pro. Could I honestly justify replacing this amazing chip with a phenom II? To be more specific..

This is the article that got me interested. Mainly this

the most exciting processor to overclock out of the bunch was the X2 555. Unlocked to 4 cores, we ended up with a stable 301 base clock; a shade over the 4GHz mark running 8GB of our Corsair Dominator

I'm not looking for a raw performance upgrade per say over the Q9550 but something more.. fun? Also considering remaining immoral and swapping out the copy of windows for a Corsair H50:rolleyes:

Give me your thoughts! Also yes for those who remember me, yes I am back :pac:

I wouldnt!
What is your Q9550 running at? It should be lots of fun to oc on that board.
If the board isnt up too it i would get one of the ddr3 versions of these: http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=205132&highlight=ep45+ud3
People on that thread running q9550 at 4.5. A H50 would be a nice addition too!
I know a guy...ahem..who buys every second m$haft OS and thinks that leaves the price about write!!

StopNotWorking

The most I could get it to was 3.7 but at the moment its at 3.1 . It's the good stepped model too but for whatever reason I couldn't get it over 3.5 stable.. possible a bad chip because the temps were.. survivable.

I'll invest in the H50 first and depending on how much guff the 9550 I'll consider replacing it sooner rather then later. Either way the thought of upgrading to a more modern socket still remains.. I'm just being picky aren't I?

StopNotWorking

StopNotWorking wrote: »

The most I could get it to was 3.7 but at the moment its at 3.1 . It's the good stepped model too but for whatever reason I couldn't get it over 3.5 stable.. possible a bad chip because the temps were.. survivable.

I'll invest in the H50 first and depending on how much guff the 9550 I'll consider replacing it sooner rather then later. Either way the thought of upgrading to a more modern socket still remains.. I'm just being picky aren't I?

Its what you would enjoy more really! Upgrading to newer amd or intel sockect and oc'ing that or trying to get more out of the Q9550! Sounds like the board (possibly ram) is holding you back on the Q9550 as any of the E0 stepping chips seem to go to 4 at a minimum.

StopNotWorking

Well for the first 2 months I had it, it was sitting at 3.7Ghz on stock voltage then out of the blue it got all cheeky and wouldn't do anything. I cant remember the ram off hand but I think its 1066 OCZ reaperx. I did have a feeling it was the ram holding me back before so I wouldn't put it past that now

Inquitus

TBH a decent Core 2 Quad on 45nm is plenty good enough for a long while to come imo. CPUs started to outstrip consumer requirements around the C2D's advent and now you have ridic i5 and i7 CPUs which are simply OTT for anything bar benchmarking and HD movie encoding.

Games are all GPU limited bar a few badly coded exceptions on any decent rig of the past couple of years. By all means replace your 775 if you have money to burn and want to have some fun OCing and benching on more cutting edge gear, but for anything else unless you manipulate massive photos or HD movies i5 and i7 are a pointless upgrade from a 45nm Core 2 Quad.

BadCharlie

I would keep what you have.

Had that chip my self or it was the 9450 & upgraded to the system in my sig. did not notice an improvement in my FPS in games. But for encoding ect... the new system was a-lot better.

Depends on what your using your computer for. If its just web browsing and gaming then keep what you have. Also your quad clocked at 3.1 is fine for games. If you clocked it to 3.7 like u had before i dont think you will notice anything at all while playing games.

I saw an article and diagram showing once your CPU is running around 3.2ghz intel/amd then any extra overclock you get from their on does not improve FPS all that much and scales very poorly to your overclock.

PogMoThoin

I'm guessing if You only got 3.7Ghz then You've not got a E0, mine does 3.8 undervolted. Can do 4Ghz with a push in voltage but I can't get stable there with 4 sticks of ram

StopNotWorking

No it's an E0 stepping. I was working on it again last night for a few hours. Seemingly it was my ram holding me back. If I left everything memory related on stock settings and just worked on the cpu I got some good results. It's at 3.7Ghz stable on stock volts but the temps are reaching up near the 90s on core0 and core1 after only an hour on prime95. I got it to 4Ghz at 1.4 volts but it wasnt stable, not sure whether better cooling will help that or not though.

StopNotWorking

StopNotWorking wrote: »

No it's an E0 stepping. I was working on it again last night for a few hours. Seemingly it was my ram holding me back. If I left everything memory related on stock settings and just worked on the cpu I got some good results. It's at 3.7Ghz stable on stock volts but the temps are reaching up near the 90s on core0 and core1 after only an hour on prime95. I got it to 4Ghz at 1.4 volts but it wasnt stable, not sure whether better cooling will help that or not though.

Those ocz reapers should oc decently. Ive seen them pushesd to 1150 with small voltage boost. Be carefull with the temps, intel max for that cpu is 71.4 so 90 for any sustained period will cause damage. If your hitting 90 on prime95 then you definitely need better cooling! Intel burn test is very effective and fast at finding stable settings for a cpu but can run ~15 degress hotter under load than prime small fft's. 20runs of ibt = 20 hours prime 95 small ffts. Also be sure not to just up vcore and leave everything else auto, nothing should be left auto when oc as majority of boards will feed massive pll and vterm volts into the cpu when vcore is incremented even slightly. High pll can destroy a chip very fast!

StopNotWorking

Yeah I'm not going to try intelburntest until I get better cooling on it . I've used it before and it's gone above and beyond what I thought was possible when stress testing a chip and I know I'll break something if I try it. I've tried tweeking the settings on the ram, even setting it manually to the spec listed for the chips gives me huge stability problems

StopNotWorking

StopNotWorking wrote: »

Yeah I'm not going to try intelburntest until I get better cooling on it . I've used it before and it's gone above and beyond what I thought was possible when stress testing a chip and I know I'll break something if I try it. I've tried tweeking the settings on the ram, even setting it manually to the spec listed for the chips gives me huge stability problems

Try running it at stock, use memset to find all the manufacturer timings and subtimings and set to that. The most important settings for stability for ram are voltage (leave stock), trfc (try upping this by increments of 5 for better stabilty) and most important is performance level. Too low of a pl will lead to instability but in this case i doubt the board is setting it too low unless you have a performace memory profile enabled. You should be able to run pl 7 at stock speed so try setting manually to that, 8 will be fine aswell with only a small hit to memory bandwidth. Higher=more stable. if none of these things are working it is probably the mch core vlotage that needs upping and also the mch ref may need to be adjusted. A thread for your board will give good tips on mch core and ref.

StopNotWorking

Ok well I've done some work on the cooler. I have two Scythe Kaze Maru 140mm 1900rpm fans that were in the front of my case so I slapped them on either side of the cooler to get some push pull going. It's stable at 3.7Ghz now and just peaks 70 degrees on full load. I'll keep working with this for a while but I might as well upgrade the components that wont need replacing with new releases.

Mainly the CPU cooler and case, I was thinking about the Noctua NH-D14
http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.aspx?sku=512803

I really haven't got a clue about the case.. I had my eyes set on the HAF 932 but the more I look at it the more I don't like it . I was looking into the Corsair 800D though.. complete overkill right? I heard it's not even that good of a case for aircooling.

Has anyone got any suggestions for a good high quality case I can keep for yonks? At the moment the only thing I can see lasting years is my 750W corsair psu. Hopefully after the new case and cooler are bought I'll be able to add them to the list of things that wont need upgrading for a long time