Just weighing in my "Secondary computer" of mine is a 775 machine, although it's using a 12MB cache, HarperTown core quad core chip OC'd @ 3.75 ghz on custom water loop (cpu only, for now) and running a pair of GTX 260's in SLI.
I haven't tried it much in games yet (Just got the SLI part working a few days ago.. still restoring backups on to it today) but the very late late quad core cores for 775 (HarperTown core Server CPU's are at least 1 generation newer / later than the Wolfdale/Penryn Core2Quad desktop chips) are very competitive and this one here with only 4 threads is scoring faster than stock speed'ed I7-940 x58/LGA-1366 i7 chip, I haven't compared it to the new i5's yet.
It's just a "spare gaming computer" for me now, nothing really amazing, just something to use in case my big i7 craps it's self tits-up some day.
Also I can't play crysis 3 even on my pair of super overclocked +45% gtx 470's on my big overclocked 4.4 ghz i7 gaming computer, it runs like 20-25 FPS has visible "hitching" and "jumps" from frame to frame and isn't even 30 FPS, and is just horrible, even on low settings. Sorry.. but your claim of running it at-or-above 30 FPS on core2/775 anything and a single gtx 460 is just not possible.
Watchdogs is just impossible on this system even on minimum possible settings, both of these are some of the few DirectX-11 games I can't play even on this machine, a core2 anything has no chance if you're running a desktop variant, maybe possible with a higher-end server chip.
easy_john wrote:RacoonRider wrote: i5 in a laptop and a rather new i5 at work and they all seem just about the same speed against C2Q.
Mobile version of cpu is always about 1.5-2 times slower, than desktop ones.
You can find performance difference in this table by yourself http://cpubenchmark.net/cpu_list.php
I think what you meant to link is the "Main List" over here: http://cpubenchmark.net/mid_range_cpus.html
Something of note here, the "Mobile i5", the brand new spring 2015 Broadwell core chips, "Intel Core i5-5200U @ 2.20GHz", even though it's only 2 physical cores with hyper-threading, is a whole 26 cpu's faster (in this list) than the desktop "Intel Core2 Quad Q9400 @ 2.66GHz" CPU. So the newer tech.. the new mobile chips are actually a decent bit -faster- than some desktop quad cores, a lot of amd 4 core desktop chips are below it in there too.