Upgrading Q6600 -> Sandy Bridge: which one?

[Benetanegia]

Congrats man. I did the exact same upgrade just 3 weeks ago. Q6600 to 2500K + 8 GB and I'm very happy too, like night and day in games and rendering. My election was a lot easier though, because in the retailer where I get my parts from, the 2500k costed exactly the same as the non-k 2500 (~180 euro) and 80 euros less than what the 2600k costed. 50% higher price for so little improvement could not be justified, even if the 2600k itself demolished any Westmere i5/i7 CPU in price/performance. The ram was an even easier choice since they had a 2x4GB Patriot 1600 Mhz bundle for sale for only 5 euro more than 2x2 GB bundles and I do have a use for so many ram, so...

It's funny but I've seen dozens of people going from Q6600 to 2500k, I don't know if it's because both are/were such a good deal (which they are) or it's just that seing Q6600 and 2500k together calls my attention.

[Paulieg]

Originally Posted by qubit

That's great dude. I've heard that these babies can easily run at 5GHz on the stock cooler, so don't hold back.

That really is just not true. It's not hard to get about half of these chips to 5.0 on good cooling. Not all of them will make it there stable on reasonable vcore, nor can you run stability tests on the stock cooler on anything but stock vcore. Just don't want people's expectations to go wild.

[qubit]

Thanks for the clarification. I don't know from experience, just from what I've seen people post, on TPU and elsewhere. But it certainly doesn't hurt to try!

[shakaxd]

I'm comfortable with the 4.0GHz mark and performance, don't feel I really need more than that for the moment. Considering I'll probably stick with this CPU for 4 years (my usual time between major upgrades), video card for another 1 (usually replace every 2), and I live in a damn hot country (at the time of this post, 32c ambient temp), I don't want to push it too much now, and leaving a good headroom on both CPU and GPU for a late push closer to their replacement sounds like a plan

F1 2010 for instance, managed to run it earlier today on 91fps max, 70fps avg with 8xMSAA. For me that's already great enough FSX runs capped to 30fps for better overall performance, GTR² / rFactor are easily over 60fps even under hard conditions, like GTR² rain + night + 35 AI grid at Spa, and last but not least Shift 2 Unleashed is around 60fps avg. Other games, like CoD series, are also over 60fps with all graphics settings I like to have.

... and no, did not and will not test Crysis with it lol.

[LagunaX]

Most ppl are hitting 4.6-4.7ghz under 1.4v with the 2500k's.
4.7-4.9ghz with the 2600k's, and greater than 1.4v for 5ghz stability.
You can also drop that 0.1 to 0.2ghz if you disable PLL Overvoltage so that your system can resume from sleep or standby properly without a hard reboot.
Just my $0.02.