reality check

Howard Goldstein schrieb:
> The QX6700 is sometimes on ebay for around 3 smackers. While that
> seems a pretty good discount and with all of the usual caveats about
> not knowing what the chip's been through or if it's even going to show
> up, a part of me, the cheap bastard, says that it's a waste of money
> in that the Q6600 G0 I alrady have that I'm only OCing 10% right now
> at auto everything could with a couple or 6 hours of direct effort and
> a few days of prime95ing be a decent 3.2-3.4ghz 24/7 processor on the
> striker extreme without frying either the cpu or stressing the
> motherboard out too much and I've walked past these.

IMHO, buying anything of the Extrem-series from Intel is pure stupidity
with the current cheap, hardcore-overclockable hardware around. The
Q6600 should do *at least* 3.0GHz without any vcore increase or temp
problems, that's my experience. Unfortunately, with my mobo (P5N32-E
SLI) it won't go one MHz above that number. I haven't tested that with
the new BIOS that came out recently, though.

And in addition to this, in games, the more MHz won't do nothing if you
have a decent GPU. For example, there's virtually NO SINGLE frame
difference in Crysis for me between stock 2.4GHz and overclocked 3.0GHz
with my (overclocked to 680MHz) GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB.

Bigger is not always better! You should be well aware whether "more"
actually *gives* you more. It's the same with RAM -- I've seen two
friends buying 4GB of RAM, while I sold 1GB from my 3GB setup because
it's worth *nothing* in practice! 2GB is currently the maximum you
should have, if you want to make sense. Everything above that will
probably never be in use.

Daniel