How about no? just run a zen based athlon? or ryzen 5 for a bit more and a hundred times the performance lol
No as along with this retro pc I will be adding more in the future. It is part of me getting more into a hobby I like and doing it more affordably for years to come. I want to play games on floppy with some being 18 years to 20 years old and some maybe even older. I want to play games on proper machines for certain eras. Also in regards to this particular pc that it was the first ever build for my son and will never be sold. We still have the socket 775 cpu from before the upgrade too which may go into another pc but if not it is kept. My son and I also have main rigs and they are not new at all but they do what they need to do. AMD FX 6300 with 12 GB ram and a GTX 760 for him and I have an i5 2500k and a GTX 670. I had a GTX 1080 Ti for a short while and I do miss it but gaming is still good. Also note we also console game so if a game does not run well on pc we get it on console when it is dirt cheap and also rent games to try newer titles out sooner.
Depends what you’re planning to run on it (some games are more CPU heavy than others), but tbh i would not spend more than a hundred bucks or so on a GPU for a Q6600 unless you’re planning to upgrade the rest of it sooner or later.
If it’s to run retro stuff, get a period appropriate GPU as well like an 8800GTS or something. In today’s GPU power thats similar to say, a 730 or intel hd4600.
You won’t be doing much streaming (unless you mean youtube or something) with a Q6600. They just aren’t powerful enough.
I still have one kicking around here somewhere.
But yeah, honestly unless its specifically for retro stuff i’d put the money towards an APU or something.
It currently has a 9800 GT so it is ready to be used for that time period but I don’t mind switching this pc back and forth in terms of components. The thing is though if you look at one of the videos I linked it talked of a trick where you can use a chip that was never intended for regular user use but is priced better than a Q9650. Anyway the idea right now is to pair it with a GPU I guess that allows for flexibility with some new gaming but some old gaming. I don’t know if anyone watched the videos btw but it provided some interesting information.
Additionally…
Something like an RX570 is more card than that CPU is really capable of keeping up with a lot of the time. The only reason i’d suggest spending up to say 100 bucks on a GPU is if you’re buying new.
I wouldn’t go beyond something like a 1050 or rx560 for it personally.
The 9800GT in it is about the right card to leave in it IMHO.
What will likely kill you with a Q6600 especially on newer tiles is that unless i’m mistaken a lot of the boards will top out at 4 GB of RAM(?). Definitely no more than 8.
Also… i just remembered. I did try and fit my rx480 to my q6600 last year during the mining craze to have a box to just sit there mining. Either my Q6600 board is dead, or the card won’t work in that board…
When I mentioned streaming we hardly do it with our main pcs and consoles. Thing is though it would be nice to be able to do playing some old games on a proper machine and put it on the net but I guess the best way may just be to get some capture card appropriate for the hardware. Yes? Also maxing out the ram would be great but I have to check to see how much it can hold. Anyway …
The CPU in it won’t be fast enough to encode at any sort of half decent bit-rate. It does not support the media encoding instructions (name of them escapes me at the moment) of the more recent core i series CPUs. Maybe you could do it with the GPU (i’m not a streamer), but the CPU is definitely too old for it.
What if one uses a modded server intended cpu ( Xeon E5450) with the motherboard like it said works well in the one video? Still a no?
None of the CPUs that fit in that socket include the h.264 acceleration instructions (quicksync), so none of them will really be quick enough for it.
The new instructions speed encoding up by something like a factor of 8x (for sandy bridge on vs off - so probably like 16x faster than the q6600 at same clock for an ix-2xxx) or so from memory, so its not just a core count or clock speed thing…
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Can you daisy chain pcs together somehow to have the faster pc do streaming / recording?
If you got a newer card for the machine you would gain access to hardware encoding. I don’t know the state of things for AMD but I know nvenc works pretty good so long as you have the vram to spare.
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1050-1060 or an rx570 I’d say.
Why no cpu upgrade tho? Got a good oc?
I’m gonna be honest, you’d get better results from a b350 motherboard and a zen based Athlon or Ryzen 3. And the cost wouldn’t be much more.
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The OP will be gaming at 60 fps or less, at that rate the Q6600 will drive an RX 570. Minimum frames may be noticeable here and there though.
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The concern is single threaded CPU performance. If there are no modern AAA games, it might do, but frankly, you can’t take the Q6600 past even 3.2GHz on water, (trust me, I would know. I had one) so I’m offering an alternative that might last longer.
Was that one of the magical stepping 0 ones?
Yup.
Also will have warranty, be much much faster, have some future proofing, etc.
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It was. I hit 3.2 on a crappy loop, and pretty much ran it like that until I bought a 6700k.
And I vowed to never watercool again.
No cpu upgrade as Wendell gifted this Core 2 Q6600 to my son and I want it to get some use. Also actually it was already a cpu upgrade as before it there was an e5200 in it. Finally eventually there will be cpu upgrades but it will be constant tinkering back and forth with this system I think. Finally as for an OC I don’t recall if we tried one but not afraid of doing that as the cooler on it is very good. It is the HAF912.
(Oops! HAF912 is a case and damn good one from CoolerMaster and as for the cooler I am trying now to remember what it was …)
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This isn’t about needing this pc to last longer in terms of it being a main gaming rig as it will always be able to used for something. It is just about pairing it with the right video card for this exact cpu but also recognized a better cpu will be put in this rig at times. Like I intend to have the best cpus in this eventually. The Q9650 and maybe even something more than the E5450 and yeah waiting for price drops isn’t an issue for me.