New CPU upgrade sees worse performance.

[Stoves]

So recently, I've upgraded the CPU on my Dell OptiPlex 380. It came installed with an Intel Pentium Dual Core E5800. A month later, I decided to upgrade to an Intel Core 2 Duo E8400. Every single site (with the exception of UserBenchmark) I've seen comparing the two, along with a lot of opinions, show that the E8400 is significantly better. How come I'm seeing worse performance? It has a strange bottleneck in less demanding games, and only shows a performance boost in very particular games. Overall, browsing the web is a lot better, I'm able to watch Ultra HD/Quad HD video (sometimes even 4k) and can do general tasks with ease. Despite this however, its gaming performance is extremely lacking compared to my older CPU. How can this be?

Note: I've cleaned my fan and cooler, reapplied thermal paste, cleaned my motherboard, and pretty much the entire system, yet still no performance increase.

[DaveLembke]

What do you have for a Video Card?

Also the Pentium E5800 will do better with single-threaded games with the 3.2Ghz clock and newer core design than the older Core 2 Duo.

Other than the extra Cache, there isnt much gain in the Core 2 Duo vs the Pentium E. I wouldnt expect that much of a difference in performance however lesser performance, the only thing I see is that single-threaded games will run 200Mhz slower at 3Ghz vs 3.2Ghz however the difference shouldnt be noticed much.

I'd benchmark your system yourself to see how your system is actually running as well as look at how hot that CPU is running. If the CPU is running too hot it will thermal throttle and run like junk.

I use the free trial of passmark for my benchmarks. I generally run it before an upgrade and then after and save the results to compare or I write down the scores to see what kind of gains or unusual bottle necks pop up. https://www.passmark.com/products/pt.htm

Speedfan can be used to check your CPU temp. http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php


I recently upgraded a Dell Inspiron 530S from a Core 2 Duo E4300 1.8Ghz to a Core 2 Duo E6700 2.66Ghz and one issue I ran into was the heatsink wasnt able to get rid of the hotter running E6700's heat. So I had to replace the heatsink for the socket 775 CPU and then all was better. It ran like junk thermal throttling after it warmed up. I tried a Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4Ghz in it but the chipset I found out doesnt support quadcores. The E6700 was the fastest CPU I had on hand to make it as fast as it can run for what it is, but the extra heat the stock heatsink wasnt enough for and so the newer heatsink with heatpipes on it made a big difference and the performance gain from the E4300 1.8Ghz to E6700 2.66Ghz was then very good. I had a GeForce GT 610 video card that I added to this and it runs pretty well for what it is now and is my daughters new system to replace her single-core socket 478 Celeron D 2.8Ghz 335J that she had been running prior which was originally a Pentium 4 2.4Ghz but the Celeron D ran better than the Pentium 4 2.4Ghz at 400Mhz faster clock and SSE3 instructions that the Pentium 4 was lacking for multimedia and gaming. The socket 478 Celeron D 335J is interesting in that its internals were pretty much intended for a socket 775 but they made it backwards compatible to socket 478 boards to be part of the low cost new computer market and so cut corners in component composition, but marketing as a "D" when Pentium D and Celeron D's were new and so such as this Celeron D 335J was yanked out of a dead eMachine which was constructed when most systems were onto socket 775 for intel CPUs and this one was a build that eMachine cut corners using abundance of older parts in its make up but still be able to market it as NEW and Celeron D which looks like any other socket 775 Celeron D out there, but big performance differences in DDR vs DDR2 etc. This made for an interesting scenario where a slightly newer Celeron beats the pants off of a slightly older Pentium 4.

[Stoves]

Thank you very much for the applications and such. I never would have thought the actual heat sink might be the issue, albeit I haven't tested that yet.

As for the video card, I use an XFX AMD Radeon HD 6670 (1GB DDR3) clocked at 800Mhz for both the core and memory. As for my benchmarks, the results came out surprisingly low, considering the games I'm able to run. My temperature to me seems fairly low, idling at about 32C and increasing to a max of 39C ~ 40C when watching full HD videos. As I'm typing this reply, it is at a stable 34C. While gaming, it can reach temps as high as 65C ~ 70C, only ever restarting due to heat once. After that restart, I reapplied thermal paste and never had the same issue. Also, if my PSU matters, I have a 235W max PSU. I'm well aware that that is superbly low and am planning on moving the motherboard to a bigger and better case so as to stuff a much better PSU into it.

[BC_Programmer]

just checking a few benchmark comparison sites and the reason many sites rank the Cure 2 Duo much better seems to largely be because for some reason it is cheaper than the E5800. CPUBoss for example gives the Core 2 Duo a score of 5.9 versus the E5800's 4.9, which sounds like a good upgrade, but if you look at the breakdown, the two are pretty much identical except for the "Value" rating, which massively skews the overall comparison.

It shouldn't be performing worse, but this would at least explain why a performance increase would be expecting too much, beyond added hardware capabilities like video decoding.

[DaveLembke]

Your CPU temp shouldn't climb over 60C. My Core 2 Duo E6700 2.66Ghz with new heatsink levels off at 54C when gaming and rests around 35C idle, and with the stock heatsink for the E4300 it was climbing like yours over 70C towards 80C and then started to run like garbage as it slows its performance to reduce heat and avoid meltdown. The shutdown temp for the board was 85C but never shut down on me because I shut it down when i saw the problem I was facing. After all CPU installs and all systems that I pick up for free, one of the first things I do before running them for any length of time is see what the CPU temp is. Speedfan has a graphing ability too so if you want to see where it levels off at you can run that and then run games and then minimize or end the game and go back to the Speedfan session and look at graph and see where your temperatures climbed to. It also shoudl show your video card and other temperatures as well to point out any hot spots. Its correct like 99% of the time, sometimes it will show like 128C right at boot and its a bogus reading where it cant interface with that sensor etc.

[patio]

It could very well be the MBoard was not optimised for that CPU...even if it works