Quote Originally Posted by LUCI5R View Post
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.
You did run this test @ stock 2666 MHZ right? Was the previous system stock clocked as well? Considering you were on an 4mb cache chip, going up 8mb in cache and 500 or so MHz in speed, you won't see an incredible noticeable difference. Now try running that test @ 3.6GHz which your E6420 probably couldn't do on the P5W DH, then you'll see the improvement. Also consider that the 975X chipset is probably still faster @ stock than any chipset released since. Too bad the chip has trouble with that board though. I think you've not enjoyed the potential of your purchase yet until you oveclock it. Most intel cpus perform with 10-15% of each other @ stock clocks.