A machine from 2008 will probably handle 8GB max. Core quads are nice CPUs and good upgrade parts. And compared to C2Q a new PC has power well beyond my requests...

Sounds good, with the right graphics card it could be a very nice DX9/10 machine.

I wouldn't bother with DX11 games though , you really want at least a Radeon 6870 or better for those kinds of games.

I use an overclocked C2Q Q6600 for my main rig, and it does well for what I do with it. 8GB of RAM would more than likely be the limit for a system of that age. As for video card, depends on what you want to do. If you want to run newer games, you'll need a newer video card, of course, such as the GTX 660 I'm using in my main rig.

RacoonRider wrote:

A machine from 2008 will probably handle 8GB max. Core quads are nice CPUs and good upgrade parts. And compared to C2Q a new PC has power well beyond my requests...

I read the mobo specifications on the asus website. I think it said 16 gigs max, but ddr2 isn't cheap.

Some boards from that era indeed handle >8GB of memory, but it wasn't extremely common (2-4GB was still very normal, so 8+GB is on the high-end side). Performance wise, I use a Core 2 Quad Q9550 as my main computer, and have a dual-core E6550 as an additional machine; both are still quite competent. The 9550 has 8GB of DDR3, and a GeForce GTX 660 (before that, Radeon HD 4800s in CrossFire); DX10 works just fine in the one or two games I have that can use it, I don't have anything that uses DX11 that I'm aware of though. The E6550 has a Quadro FX 1700 (GF8600) and 4GB of RAM, and handles the web and multimedia content just fine, but I haven't tried much gaming (in synthetic benchmarks like 3DMark and Aquamark it scores similarly to a GeForce 7900 though).

I think if you want to build a gaming machine, depending on what the board, PSU, case, your budget etc will let you get away with, you have lots of options - even if you want to do DX10/11. Alternately, put a "simple" graphics card in it (I like GF8600 because they're cheap and have complete h.264/flash/etc acceleration; the modern GT 610 would also be good) and have a fantastic web machine as-is. I wouldn't consider 8-12GB of RAM or a quad-core to be necessary for gaming - it really depends on the games though; if you're primarily running 32-bit DX9 titles the extra ram beyond 6GB is a waste of money (because none of them can use more than 3GB), but some newer 64-bit titles will favor the extra cores and require 6GB of RAM at minimum; C2Q and 8GB would be a good place to be.

Graphics card wise, the sky is really the limit - if you're trying to keep it era accurate, the Radeon HD 4000 and GeForce 200 series are where you want to live, but Radeon HD 2000 and 3000 and GeForce 8/9 are also good choices, as are newer cards. What you pick will depend on budget, power supply abilities, motherboard support (can it do SLI? CrossFire? neither? do you care about multi-GPU?), case size (some of the higher-end cards can be huge), and what it needs to actually do - if you're wanting to run something demanding (let's say Skyrim) at high resolution, you will want a very powerful card, but if you just want to trod around on the web and run lighter games, even modern entry-level cards may be suitable.

NIce score dude! I'm currently running an old computer that I bought in December of 08. It's a Dual Core E8400 with 8gb RAM and I've put in a Sapphire 7790 HD gfx card. This thing can compete pretty fairly with the run of the mill modern computers imho, or at least it's plenty fast enough for me. You may have a really nice computer there when you get it all maxed out.

Wait! You actually just stumbled upon something I can help you with!

First things first: You want a better CPU than that.
As you've already said, you wanted a quad core of some description, however I have found the the online prices for Core2 Quads are outrageous for their performance. Interestingly, at that point in time, Intel used a very similar socket for their high-end Xeon processors. Evidently the sockets were so similar that all that is required to make use of the cheaper Xeon quad cores is to switch around a few pins.

http://www.delidded.com/lga-771-to-775-adapter/

^The above is a page that has information on using one of the chips in question.

If you are willing to overclock, some of the 45nm quads/xeons could hit 4GHz. In that case, you should likely go with faster RAM over a larger quantity as FSB overclocking can be a double-edged sword.

Tom's hardware did a very comprehensive look at how a computer with a Core 2 CPU would stack up against something newer, and needless to say I'm impressed.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ivy-bridg … rison,3487.html

meisterister wrote:

First things first: You want a better CPU than that.
As you've already said, you wanted a quad core of some description, however I have found the the online prices for Core2 Quads are outrageous for their performance. Interestingly, at that point in time, Intel used a very similar socket for their high-end Xeon processors. Evidently the sockets were so similar that all that is required to make use of the cheaper Xeon quad cores is to switch around a few pins.

http://www.delidded.com/lga-771-to-775-adapter/

This is true. Core 2 Quads are priced higher than their Xeon equivalents. However, it's not as simple as switching around a few pins. I had to do several things in order to get my LGA771 Xeon working as it should on a LGA775 board.

1. Buy and use the adapter on the Xeon CPU
2. Physically mod the motherboard socket in order to accept the Xeon CPU
3. Mod the bios to add the microcode for the Xeon

Well, if I am going to be building a new PC this christmas, than I might as well give this one to my little brother. I'll probably have to upgrade it though because he likes a lot of new games like assassins creed, call of duty, grand theft auto, etc. So I'll just upgrade the ram to 8 gigs than the cpu to a better core 2 duo, they have some pretty cheap ones, but I could ask to pull one from the old school PC's, I volunteer at the IT department there and the one guy is pretty cool. They have some older core 2 duo machines from 2010 that they'll be replacing soon so I'll ask if I can pull one out and maybe even the RAM in some of them. Their core 2's were 3.16 ghz I think. But I don't really want to mess around with the motherboard that much, I don't want to ruin it. I'll have to think about that modification, but if I can get a new core 2 duo, than I should be good.

What you should do is just get a graphics card and say an SSD. That machine probably supports SATA2, which has a theoretical limit of around ~330MB/sec, so it's still SSD worthy. That way if you do decide to do a full on upgrade you can just swap the SSD/GPU parts over to your new machine. 6GB of ram is plenty for right now, don't waste money on DDR2 unless its dirt cheap.

If you're not completely happy with the performance or whatever you can just give it to your brother and take back your ssd/gpu and use it for your new build.

double

fyy wrote:

What you should do is just get a graphics card and say an SSD. That machine probably supports SATA2, which has a theoretical limit of around ~330MB/sec, so it's still SSD worthy. That way if you do decide to do a full on upgrade you can just swap the SSD/GPU parts over to your new machine. 6GB of ram is plenty for right now, don't waste money on DDR2 unless its dirt cheap.

If you're not completely happy with the performance or whatever you can just give it to your brother and take back your ssd/gpu and use it for your new build.

I'd agree. A faster CPU will help a little bit for gaming (I say a little bit because you're staying in the same processor family and just going up in clockspeed some - it isn't like going from an MMX 200 to a P3 933 or something), but upgrading the graphics card and hard-disk will be a much more noticeable upgrade. 😀

1. Buy and use the adapter on the Xeon CPU
2. Physically mod the motherboard socket in order to accept the Xeon CPU
3. Mod the bios to add the microcode for the Xeon

Alright. I knew about the first two parts. I didn't know about the 3rd part. How involved is the process, since they don't mention it on the page? They make it out to be just a BIOS update. I'm genuinely curious, since I want to try it out myself sometime.

Wait. To reply to myself:
http://www.delidded.com/lga-771-xeon-microcode/

It looks like it makes the overall Xeon-having experience far nicer, but is optional unless the system is really unstable.

obobskivich wrote:

fyy wrote:

What you should do is just get a graphics card and say an SSD. That machine probably supports SATA2, which has a theoretical limit of around ~330MB/sec, so it's still SSD worthy. That way if you do decide to do a full on upgrade you can just swap the SSD/GPU parts over to your new machine. 6GB of ram is plenty for right now, don't waste money on DDR2 unless its dirt cheap.

If you're not completely happy with the performance or whatever you can just give it to your brother and take back your ssd/gpu and use it for your new build.

I'd agree. A faster CPU will help a little bit for gaming (I say a little bit because you're staying in the same processor family and just going up in clockspeed some - it isn't like going from an MMX 200 to a P3 933 or something), but upgrading the graphics card and hard-disk will be a much more noticeable upgrade. 😀

Yes, but to be fair if he went from a Core 2 Duo to a Core 2 Quad, in games that take advantage of a quad he would notice a big difference. The only problem is he is then upgrading an old platform, not really worth it if he is actually wanting to get a new system.

Best bet, get a new GPU and SSD, and then overclock the Core 2 Duo and if you aren't happy with the results then just put your SSD and GPU in a new system. Although a Q6600 isn't that expensive these days and you could probably get one for around $35

I upgraded my system from a Q6600 to a Q9650 to max it out. Some games which are badly programmed took some advantage of the new processor. Another noticeable performance gain was on DOS Box. Things also load a little faster because the Q9650 got more cache memory than the Q6600. With a good cooling system the Q9650 can easily hit 3.6GHz.

meisterister wrote:

Wait. To reply to myself:
http://www.delidded.com/lga-771-xeon-microcode/

It looks like it makes the overall Xeon-having experience far nicer, but is optional unless the system is really unstable.

I chose to update the bios it as the CPU was missing instructions such as Speedstep (I used CPUZ to find out). Which to me is a necessity, if not then the CPU would be running at full clockspeed and voltage regardless of load.

You can buy Q8200 CPUs on eBay for around $30.