FX-60 vs Q6600 at stock

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wxkid23

Limp Gawd
Joined
Mar 17, 2006
Messages
131
Im sitting on the fence right now about an upgrade and would love some input on this..

I currently am running an FX-60 at 2.61ghz along with a 7900GTX and 2GB ram.

Im looking at a cheap upgrade to last me until the new chips are affordable sometime middle-late next year. I can get the Q6600, new mobo, ram, all for under $500. Current problem with my system is slowness/stuttering a lot when multi-tasking, which we both do a lot of and im also looking at upgrading my video card to the new NVIDIA cards in the next couple months.


BTW.. im not interested right now in overclocking so this would be at stock speeds..

My questions are:

1. What kind of performance jump/if any will I see going from the FX-60 to the Q6600?

2. Does it matter that the Q6600 is a lower clock than the FX-60? Do the other better specs make up for that?

3. In your opinion (I know no such thing as future-proof) will a Q6600 paired with a new NVIDIA card in a couple months bottleneck the new card or should I be able to run most of the new games well? I have a 1080p screen but is scales fairly well and I can play at lower resolutions although I prefer 1080p.

4. Is it possible at all to sell my old computer parts anywhere and will anybody buy used processors/ram/mobo/video card? I looked on Ebay and rarely see used processors... can you get anything at all for them?

Also, Q6600 seems like best bang for the buck but that seems to be when overclocked to 3.0ghz so I need input on if it's worth it at stock speeds or should I be looking at the Q6700 (about $50 more) or the Q9450 (about $150 more) ... I know Intel is mixing up the lineup Q3 but im looking to build asap givin that im only going to use these new parts a year or so.
 
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The E6600 is about as fast as the Athlon X2 6000+ (both stock), which is much faster than an FX60 at 2.6 GHz. So a 2.4 GHz Core2 Duo is about equal to a 3 GHz Athlon X2.
And that's just two cores. Q6600 is not one, but two E6600s. You do the math :)
 
define multitasking...... are you burning multiple dvds while running a virtual machine and playing 3d shooters?

If not theres no way in hell an fx-60 should be 'stuttering' going back and forth from IE to Outlook express
 
osalcido said:
define multitasking...... are you burning multiple dvds while running a virtual machine and playing 3d shooters?

If not theres no way in hell an fx-60 should be 'stuttering' going back and forth from IE to Outlook express
Click to expand...

Heavy multi-tasking...

I trade stocks and have programs and charts running often.... often have 20-30 tabs open in Firefox...
 
huge upgrade for you here. i agree, forget clock speeds. the q6600 has 6 more mb of cache, not to mention the essential core 2 architecture just destroys the amd 64. sad story, i remember how bad i wanted a fx-60 back in the day. of course that was also when you could buy a sli chipset that oc'ed liked crazy. memories.... :)
 
I went from an FX-62 to a Q6600 a few months ago.
Both at stock, noticed no difference in games or apps.
 
UtopiA said:
I went from an FX-62 to a Q6600 a few months ago.
Both at stock, noticed no difference in games or apps.
Click to expand...


wow. all research would say otherwise, but nothing beats hands-on experience. assuming similar usage, i'd be comfortable going with what utopia is saying. although i went from a opty 170 @ 2.6ghz to q6600 and there was a dramatic difference in both games and apps. games, depends on video card and rez as to where your bottleneck will be. i know that with general apps, monitoring programs always showed 100% usage on my 170 most of the time with mulit tasking. now, it RARELY shows 100%. of course i don't think i ran stock for more than 10 min. :)
 
Well my FX-62 was the AMD equivalent of the E6600.
It's really E6600 vs Q6600 in that case. No difference in most dual apps.
 
I noticed a big difference going from an Opty 185 @ 3.0GHZ to a q6600 @ 3.0GHZ and noticed a HUGE difference. I use my computer for video work mostly, and the software scales for multi-core nicely, so the results may not be typical.
 
Well last night I was making some fraps captures with Grid and saw my fps drop from a smooth low 30's to a definite game hinderance of low 20 fps (when recording was enabled) on my Opty 165 @ 2.1, then compressing the video clips to h.264 took some time as well. Web browsing while the converting was in the background altered the overall length (increased it).
 
UtopiA said:
Well my FX-62 was the AMD equivalent of the E6600.
It's really E6600 vs Q6600 in that case. No difference in most dual apps.
Click to expand...

These results show the E6600 being ahead of the FX-62 virtually everywhere: http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=5692&page=3
Sometimes the difference is quite large aswell, especially with audio/video encoding.

And don't forget the overclocking potential of the Core2.
The FX series won't go much further than 3.2 GHz.
The E6600/Q6600 can reach 3.2 GHz aswell, but obviously they're much faster then.
 
Scali2 said:
And don't forget the overclocking potential of the Core2.
The FX series won't go much further than 3.2 GHz.
The E6600/Q6600 can reach 3.2 GHz aswell, but obviously they're much faster then.
Click to expand...
Yeah that's true, but the OP says he won't OC so I have to stress "at stock".
:eek:
 
If you're not going to overclock, why go with a Q6600 at all here? Why not a Q9300 or something like that? Just a bit more money than a Q6600 and 45nm process, cooler, faster clock for clock, etc.

I did just go from an Opteron 185 to an overclocked Q6600 and I have noticed a difference in general responsiveness of the computer but some of that is probably brand new OS vs old OS and 32bit vs 64bit. I haven't yet run a bunch of benchmarks on the new rig but I expect it will be a good bit faster.
 
LanceDiamond said:
If you're not going to overclock, why go with a Q6600 at all here? Why not a Q9300 or something like that? Just a bit more money than a Q6600 and 45nm process, cooler, faster clock for clock, etc.
Click to expand...

agreed. unless price is the determining factor. difference of around 50-60 bucks.
 
Or...

I guess another option I have is waiting for the Q3 refresh (Does that mean chips likely by late July/early August?) and pick up a Q9550 for $316...

I want to leave the door open to OC if I want to thus I am going to buy a mobo that supports it well but I also want to know that stock runs okay if I choose not to OC at all. Thus the 9300 I have heard isn't that great of performer... so it's really coming down to Q6600 vs Q6700 vs 9450 or 9550 later... hmm..
 
wxkid23 said:
Or...

I guess another option I have is waiting for the Q3 refresh (Does that mean chips likely by late July/early August?) and pick up a Q9550 for $316...

I want to leave the door open to OC if I want to thus I am going to buy a mobo that supports it well but I also want to know that stock runs okay if I choose not to OC at all. Thus the 9300 I have heard isn't that great of performer... so it's really coming down to Q6600 vs Q6700 vs 9450 or 9550 later... hmm..
Click to expand...

the q9300 bests the q6600 anywhere from 5-14% at STOCK speeds (sse4 and new 45nm architecture). Typically the q9300 will overclock a bit better as well. The main reason for people preferring the q6600 is the multiplier. The q9300 has a 7.5 the q6600 has a 9. So if your mobo won't go above 400mhz fsb, you are better off with a q6600 (typically a sli chipset). I'm one of those people who like the q6600 better b/c my mobo won't go above 410 with all four ram dimms filled. You need a crazy fsb to make the q9300 the better choice for overclockers.
 
I went from an A64 X2 4400 OC'd to 2.7GHz to a Q6600 OC'd to 3.7. Honestly, in day to day apps, I don't notice a great difference. Obviously in gaming and video rendering the new CPU is extremely powerful, but for general OS use, I'd have to say RAM makes a bigger difference than most other upgrades.
 
I just made the same jump you did

Old = FX60, 7900 GTO SLI, 2gb ram

New = Q6600, same 7900 GTO SLI, 8gb ram

Immediate jump in performance, system runs A LOT cooler than my FX60 did and my system is damn near silent running. I'm just running stock speeds right now, timings on memory aren't too tight either, I was running the FX60 at 2.8ghz

When the new GT200 cards come out in June I'm planning to upgrade my vid cards, hopefully it'll be worth the wait but I'm very happy with the Q6600 and 780i thus far.

CPU usage is a lot lower on the quad so multitasking is much better. I'm quite happy with the Q6600, currently planning to either part out the FX60 or make a home server out of it
 
I went from a 4800 X2 (939) @ 2.6 GHz to a E8500 @ stock 3.16 GHz and the difference is definitely noticeable. And I feel was a worthwhile upgrade.

The greatest benefit came in games (i run 1600x1200) and the fps dropped less in heavy action and allowed for higher AF/AA settings to be maintained.

The day to day desktop operations seem better, but I account that more from going from 2GB to 4GB of RAM as well.
 
I've seen this exact comparison asked about 3 times in the last two weeks on these forums. Since I recently did this upgrade I will repost my comments from the other threads.

devman said:
Just thought I'd inject my $0.02 here since I recently switched up from an FX-60 to a Q6600. The difference was pretty much night and day even with the q6600 at stock. My FX-60 was definitely bottlenecking my 8800GTS 512 in TF2, now it runs smooth as butter at the same settings (1680x1050, max everything except AA which is at like 4 or 8x I forget). I used to get dips in performance in high player servers that are now nonexistent. I overclocked the Q6600 to 3.0GHz initially just to start out with a softball (all I did was bump the FSB) and its been running like a champ since(I'll probably go back and push it harder).

Previous System:
FX-60
EVGA NF-41 SLI Mobo
3GB Corsair DDR 400

Upgraded System:
Q6600 @ 3.0GHz
EVGA 750i FTW
4GB Corsair DDR 800 (2x2GB)

Video was the same for both: EVGA 8800GTS (G92) 512MB
Click to expand...

and

devman said:
wxkid23 said:
If I decide to wait a while on overclocking (Im totally new to it and may wait) and just run the Q6600 at stock speed (2.4ghz) will I still see an improvement for multi-tasking/gaming over the FX-60 even though it has a lower clock (2.6ghz vs 2.4ghz)? It still seems like a good buy ~$200 even at stock speed. If I pair it with one of the new NVIDIA cards coming should it be okay even if I keep it at stock or does it suck at 2.4ghz?
Click to expand...

Yes I noticed improvements over the FX-60 even with the q6600 at stock. Remember though your changing other things too. Faster RAM, Faster Mobo come into the equation as well. You should see a nice bump in performance.
Click to expand...
 
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