CPU upgrade?

[oldikes]

Currently rocking a core 2 quad q9400, and looking to move to a DDR3 setup. Im trying to find out how the amd athlon 860k runs in comparison to the q9400 as im looking for a fairly notable upgrade. the anandtech benchmarks are kind of conflicting though im not at all familiar with bench tests (http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/76?vs=1707)

Does anyone have any input? if not that, whats the best processor I can get for <$75 thatll be a noticeable upgrade? my big thing is I want just a little less CPU bottleneck in badly optimized games, as the DDR3/8GB upgrade is what I need the most. Thanks for any input!

 

[Hotlynx16]

You would have to get another motherboard for the AMD, here is a comparison http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Core2-Quad-Q9400-vs-AMD-Athlon-X4-860K. I recently upgraded my old 775 board to a modified Xeon X5472 quad core , much snappier.

 

[bluto 2050]

Preuming you are rocking at least 4GB of ram Bang for the buck a 120/240GB SSD windows drive with your web browsers and frequently used exe on it and some file folders and shortcuts to a metal storage drive you will get more bang out of that than anything outside of a CPU at least twice as powerful and twice the cores outside of incremental improvement gaming maybe .oh ....some of that older DDR2 ram is actually faster than low end DDR3
depending on the memory bus speed

Upgrading a CPU here has to be twice the Pass-mark score before I even think about it from my experience incremental CPU upgrades below that usually don't do much of anything unless its a 2 to 4 core upgrade and so on which implies a much higher pass mark score anyway that can be decent with multi threaded apps and games

Sent from Windows Insider Preview Evaluation Copy . Build 14393.5.rs1 Microsoft Windows 10 fast ring Insider since 01/2015