Benchmarking and Overclocking Q9650

I'm pretty sure a lot of you are wondering if your systems are indeed CPU limited. Do you need more Ghz or is the extra cache of a new quadcore more important? So here we are with a Q9650 CPU and will overclock it to a "safe area". We will also compare it with a Q6600 (at the same speed) to see how important is the extra cache.

For starters, we used the Gigabyte EP45 UD3LR with 4GB DDR2 @1000Mhz and a GTX295. You can see our bios screens in our previous overclocking feature. The Q9650 needs lower vCore to achieve the same results we had with the Q6600. Therefore, we used 1.42V instead of 1.55V that was used for the Q6600 (and that was the limit of our Q6600). We also used 1.280V MCH Core. Everything else was at stock volts. Our system was stable 100% with these settings but you may need to tweak yours differently to achieve these speeds.

So how well does it perform? Very good, although we'd like even better results. We saw 6fps increase in both Darksiders and Resident Evil 5. Strangely, Lost Planet 2 didn't perform better (we thought we were CPU limited as there were places where the GPU usage was dropping. Apparently... we weren't). Cryostasis and Unigine are GPU limited and that's why we didn't get any increase. We also gained 1200 points in 3D Mark Vantage.

The big question is: Is it worth going from a Q6600 to a Q9650? The answer is complicated. It is not if you are willing to keep your CPU at the same frequency. There are some occasions where the extra cache makes a difference but frankly, the difference is not as big as we thought. Q9650 is a remarkable CPU and you can overclock it easily to 4.0Ghz, provided you have a good motherboard. We were able to push it to 4.05Ghz with 1.4500V Vcore. We gained 2-3fps in Resident Evil 5 and 1fps in Darksiders. In our opinnion, those extra frames are not worth the effort.

So there you have it, an apples to apples comparison with a Q6600. If you have a DDR2 of at least 1000Mhz, it isn't really worth upgrading to a Q9650. Performance is almost the same, especially if you can really push a Q6600 @ 3.6Ghz. On the other hand, the Q9650 can be pushed even more and is stable with lower volts @ 3.6Ghz, so it's really up to you to decide!