Legit Reviews

Upgrading from Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 to Core i7-4770K

We all love doing computer upgrades, but sometimes we have to ask ourselves if a full system upgrade is worth it or necessary. There are times that you may only gain a small percentage of a performance boost, where there are other times that you gain significant increases. Today I am going to compare my original Intel Kentsfield CPU and X38 motherboard to a shiny new Haswell CPU and Z87 motherboard.





Article Title: Upgrading from Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 to Core i7-4770K
Article URL: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/2247/1/
Pricing At Time of Print: $189.99 MSRP

Well enjoyable article, since i am pondering a intel Q9550 change out. i may hold off for a bit, going ddr4, and higher speed bus in 2014. nice article. Cheers from Thomas in Vancouver Canada.

Great Review. I just went from a Q9300 to the 4770K and it was great especially for cpu intensive tasks. I had the Samsung Pro in my Q9300 system already so normal tasks don't seems that much faster but anything else especially games run awesome!!!!

June 2013
Asus Z87 Expert
Intel i7 4770K
Corsair H100i Cooler
Cosair Vengeance Pro Series 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR3 DRAM 1866MHz C9 Memory Kit (CMY16GX3M2A1866C9)
XFX Core Edition FX-787A-CNFC Radeon HD 7870 (had in previous system already) Looking at 770/780 GTX to replace it
Corsair AX760 PSU
Samsung Pro 256 (had it in previous system already)
Fractal Midi R2 (Looking at Midi R2 XL when it comes out) ( I had everything in a Lian-Li V2000 1st gen before and Love having lots of room)

You didn't mention if the Q6600 was overclocked. If not, I kinda think you would have gotten much better value by OC and spending the rest on a better GPU.

That's a nice comparison you've made there. One tends to forget just how much faster our PCs have gotten in the last few years, discounting the recent incremental upgrades from SB>IB>Haswell.

I've been toying with doing a benchmark comparison between my 2700K / GTX 590 system with 16GB RAM and comparing it to that old Pentium 4 system with AGP graphics I have knocking around. The difference will be orders of magnitude better and really give a feel for how far we've come.

However, browsing the internet can stil be done just fine on that P4...

Thanks guys! I had fun writing this!

buggers wrote:You didn't mention if the Q6600 was overclocked. If not, I kinda think you would have gotten much better value by OC and spending the rest on a better GPU.

Everything was stock speeds for comparison purposes. I did OC it a bit in the past, but it wasn't worth it to me to leave it at any OC speeds, since I didn't sit down on my computer every day.

Really interesting article. I know when I went from the Q6700 to the 3770K I was blown away by the video encoding increase for hd video. Now make sure you have the newest version of the program you use or it may not even use multiple cores!

Nice comparison. Although I'm glad I upgraded from a Q8200 to the 2500k Sandy and have no intentions upgrading to Haswell. Why? There is not much in performance department to justify the upgrade and most importantly: The use of a cheap TIM instead of solder under the heatspreader by Intel, just makes any gains to be worthless. This is the main reason for 100C in the Prime95 test and just shows how stupid was Intel's move to skimp on some solder!

NAiLs wrote:Thanks guys! I had fun writing this!
Everything was stock speeds for comparison purposes. I did OC it a bit in the past, but it wasn't worth it to me to leave it at any OC speeds, since I didn't sit down on my computer every day.

Why do you waste so much money on overclocking oriented components then?

SetiroN wrote:

NAiLs wrote:Thanks guys! I had fun writing this!
Everything was stock speeds for comparison purposes. I did OC it a bit in the past, but it wasn't worth it to me to leave it at any OC speeds, since I didn't sit down on my computer every day.

Why do you waste so much money on overclocking oriented components then?

Why would one buy a Porsche if they don't drive it on the Autobahn everyday?

SetiroN wrote:

NAiLs wrote:Thanks guys! I had fun writing this!
Everything was stock speeds for comparison purposes. I did OC it a bit in the past, but it wasn't worth it to me to leave it at any OC speeds, since I didn't sit down on my computer every day.

Why do you waste so much money on overclocking oriented components then?

When I was overclocking the Q6600, I was on the system a lot... but as time passed and my life got more and more busy, I opted to remove the overclock and save some money instead. Also, it's MUCH easier to overclock these days than what it used to be. With power management features really knocking down the frequency and amount of power used when the system is idle, it'll probably make me do it again.

Thanks for the great review. It was exactly what I was looking for. Based on you info, I will hold on to my trusty Q6600 a while longer since my most demanding work is h.264 transcoding which i can run overnight. So tempting though. ;-)