A little review.

I'm coming from an E6420/2GB PC2-5400/P5W DH Deluxe and upgraded to a Q9450/4GB PC2-8000/P5Q Deluxe (P45).

This is all at Stock (8X334, 2667MHz), will be OC'ing this weekend, but wanted to compare Stock vs. OC performance.

I'm not impressed.
Sure, the system is flying in routine, regular operations like multi-tasking, boot up, opening & closing programs, etc. However, the true, labor intensive work is not showing big difference from my E6420.

For eg:- Did a video encode job last night. MKV -> WMV-HD (VC-1) 1080p (1920 X 1080) @ 11 mbps 2-Pass VBR / 768k 5.1 WMA Pro. Took about the same time it took before. I thought the SSE4.1, 12mb Cache & 4 Cores would make a noticeable difference. It didn't.

Un-raring an 8GB Archive took the same time as well.

The only difference was that during these processes, the system was more free & loose for me to do other things, hence multi-tasking galore - whereas before the system would practically render useless while doing these things.

Still, I was looking for more speed. Multi-tasking alone was neither the purpose for the upgrade, nor worth the money. So for my tasks & usage, at stock I'm definately disappointed.

I hope to OC it to at least 3.4 - 3.6, which gives me a good 1000Mhz over stock, and will take the Memory over stock as well. Hopefully I'll get better results then. Just wanted to put this out there, especially for video encoders because I know a lot of us went for the SSE4/12mb benefit in this chip over the much cheaper Q6600.