PentiumD 3.20ghz vs E6700 2.6ghz

I'm running the following motherboard in my bargain bin gaming machine.

http://www.biostar.com.tw/app/en-u [...] p?S_ID=173

I currently have the 3.20ghz PentiumD (940 SL95W) processor in it. I see that the board supports a 2.66ghz Core2Duo chip (E6700 SL9S7). Obviously the E6700 runs at a faster FSB speed and uses less voltage. Both chips have the same amount of L2 cache (4MB). The E6700 runs at an overall higher clock speed.

I am running Windows XP (32bit). I currently have 2GB of 533mhz RAM (Kingston).

Is the E6700 significantly better than the 940? Will the 2.66ghz E6700 significantly outperform the 3.20ghz 940? If so, where is a good place to get the E6700 chip? I've checked NewEgg and a few other sites but they all seem to be carrying the E6750.

I mainly use the machine to play games and I already have a GeForce 8800GT with 512MB of RAM on it. I do the occassional DVD encoding but other than that I do not use many applications that are CPU intensive.

Yes, the E6700 is much better than the PD940. The E6750 is pretty much the same as the E6700. The mobo should support it.

If your motherboard could support it, I'd go for the E8400.

Also, if you don't think you need a new processor, why waste the money. Your Pentium D can probably last a bit longer. Only upgrade if it'll be worth the $150+.

Hard to find the e6700, if you do it is way overpriced, found one for like 350.

Might find a E6400 for arround $200. I have one and Like many, have it OCed to 3.2 GHz. NOTE not much diff between 6400/6700 if OCed to 3.2. Not sure your into overclocking. And Yes both will beat the pentium D940

Here are two places. CAN Not vouch for estore. But do a google for E6400.

http://www.nowdirect.com/exec/part [...] 557PH0462M

http://www.compumusic.com/p162876.htm

An e4x00 will "mop the floor" with a 940D, especially if you overclock it.

Considering how bad the netburst arch is, you'd be surprised what would beat that 940. I remember when the C2D first came out, there were three basic groupings. The first were the C2D based machine (including the 6300) at the top, with the Athlon64s in the middle, followed by the 9xx series at the bottom. I was impressed that the lowend 1.86MHz, 2MB cache, 1066FSB 6300 could beat the highest clocked 9xx chips nearly at will. (there were only a few tests that the 9xx would win, and they didn't really matter.)

I don't think I'd bother upgrading the CPU however. If this is your "bargain bin gaming machine", keep putting the older things as you upgrade into it. Meaning as you upgrade your machine(s), put the old things into this computer. That way it sees upgrades, but as its not your primary gaming rig, you aren't actually spending money on it.

I will look into the E6400. Will that be better than the 940D?

I don't mind overclocking, in fact I've been overclocking chips since the P3/450 days. But I'd rather not try to do it on this cheap-o BioStar board. If I had an Asus board, that would be another story.

His MB only supports the following c2d's:
E6x00
E4x00
E21xx

ah.

The e2180 2Ghz to start with a 10 multiplier for $70 would be a nice economy cpu. A lot cooler and still probably equal or better than the 940. I got rid of my pent d 6 months ago. It was a dog.

I don't need it for WoW but I am going to try to play GTA IV when it comes out. I realize that the system will be underpowered for that game but I'd like to get as close as I can to having a decent GTA IV experience.

Do you think that the nvidia 9800 series cards are significantly better than the 8800 series? I'm not going to SLi them or anything.

Gotcha. Now I'm up to speed I hope.

In some cases the 9 series cards ARE the 8 series cards. The 9500GT is nothing more then an 8600GT. The 9600GSO is an 8800GS. The 9800GT is an 8800GT. Some of the nine cards are different/new, (9600GT, 9800GTX) but others are simply 8 series cards with new names. I don't think they are "significantly better", but seeing as the named 8 series cards are being phased out, the 9s are probably a better buy.

Thanks Chief. That is really helpful.

I'm not really interested in replacing the motherboard. I'd rather just get the most out of the current board and leave it at that. Don't get me wrong, I've been a fan of Asus boards for a long time and I'd much rather have one of those in my case than this BioStar brand board.

I don't want to overclock anything either. I'd rather just run everything at standard specs and be done with it. I realize that this forum is all about getting the most out of the hardware so I appreciate where you are coming from. But I've been using computers since the 286/4mhz and I think the thrill of squeezing every last ounce out of the machine worn off. At this point in my life I just want to turn the thing on and know it will work and not have to constantly worried about CPU temps and voltages and core multipliers and all that.

Well I was going to suggest a E21xx and say OC it, but you said you don't want to, So the E6600 would probably be your best bet.

And Tigerdirect has it as someone mentioned earlier, Ill repost the link

Price with Shipping to my area(yours may vary) $161.98
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applica [...] CatId=2396

Yes, you're right. The jump between a 940 and E2160 was not alot, but between the 940 and E6600 it was alot more. I looked at only the gaming, some scores were in fact 50% difference.

Be very wary of the 9600GSO. Zotac, and I assume others, have released "new" versions which are cut down G94s (ie. 9600GT), not G92s. They only have 48 stream processing units, but 512/1024MB RAM and a 256-bit memory bus.

So to recap, there are now 3 different GSO's out there?

192bit 384MB cards that are good.
128bit 512MBs that are ok, but not that good.
256bit 512MBs that are junk because the number of SP is to low.

Seriously, I might boycott Nvidia simply for this reason. They have good cards, but my decoder ring broke trying to figure out which one I should buy.

So let me get this straight, the 192bit 384MB cards are better than the 256bit 512MB cards simply because they have more processors? I can understand the logic, but intuition says that you're better off with a higher bit rate. What is the difference? Are the 192bit cards performing better on current generation apps because the 256bit cards aren't being fully utilized yet?

The 192-bit memory bus is fine at lower resolutions without AA. A 9600GSO (the good one) will beat a 9600GT without AA generally. However, turn up the AA and the card chokes from lack of memory bandwidth.

Take my usual car analogy for example. Pretend that every lane on a road can only have one car on it at a time without causing traffic problems. A 20 lane road (256-bit) vs a 15 lane road (192-bit) has 12 cars on it, one in each lane. Assuming nothing else is different, neither road should have traffic problems. If you now add in 5 more cars (turn on AA), the 20 lane road still has 3 lanes free, while the 15 lane road is doubling up on some lanes, causing a bottleneck and slowing down traffic overall.

With a reduced number of stream processors, you are simply cutting back on raw processing power and it will be slower overall, no matter what settings you run.

At the end of these roads there are car parks (for some reason) At each car park, each car needs to have a ticket to raise the gate so they can get in and park. One particular car park can give out tickets to 10 cars at a time because there are 10 ticket machines (crazy, I know). Another car park can only process 5 cars at a time. No matter what the traffic conditions are like on the roads leading to the car park, the car park that can process 10 cars at a time is always going to be more efficient. Even if you had a 100 lane road, you can still only give out tickets to 5 cars at a time at the car park.

Yes, the second analogy is quite poor, but I've never done that one before. Made it up as I was going along.

Actually, they have the same number of SP, and the same core clock speeds. (not sure about SP speeds.) The difference is that the "odd" 9600GSO has 384MBs of DDR3 clocked at shy of 2GHz, while the 512MB card has DDR2 ram clocked at 1GHz. The card with more ram is bandwidth starved. If you could find one, as normal clocked 9600GSO with 512MBs of DDR3 ram at around 2GHz should be best. If I'm not mistaken however, that card is called the 9600GT.

D@mn you Nvidia and your naming scheme. Leads to confusion even among those who should know better. Let me sum up as best I can.

1) 9600GSO. 96SP, 384MBs of ram, 192bit bus, memory speeds about 1.8GHz. (DDR3)
2) 9600GSO. 96SP, 512/1GB of ram, 128bit bus, memory speeds about 1GHz. (DDR2)
3) 9600GSO. 48SP, 512/1GB of ram, 256bit bus, memory speeds about 1.8GHz (DDR3)

When I looked a couple of days ago the Zotec card isn't available on Newegg, so I suspect its a foreign market only card. (kind of like how the ATI 9550 was supposed to be until US markets wanted it also.) Card one is really the best as card two will be starved for memory bandwidth, and card three simply doesn't have enough SP. Whats the point of putting all that memory on a card that has so few SP?

I have an e6700 that I'm not using anymore. I'll let it go for $250. I know it's stable at 3.6ghz without any voltage increase. Should hit 4ghz with a solid motherboard and a voltage bump. Always ran it water cooled, so it's never been hotter than 45c. I only stopped using it because I upped to an i7 system. I think I still have the oem cooler...not sure though.

Running folding at home, this thing would finish an SMP instance in 15-20 hours. It's a fast CPU. I was thinking about using it for an HTPC, but I'm too busy and broke now. jbavousett at yahoo dot com if you want it.

no almost to it lol

+1 for the E2180/5200. Both OC very well. Once OCed to 3-3.2Ghz it's the same as a E8400.