Awhile ago I updated from a quad 2.66 to a W3670.I chose the W3670 because of my budget at the time. The W3690 has gone down in price and my question is would I notice much of a speed increase over the 3.2 if I Updated to the 3.4.
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W3690 vs W3670
- Thread starter jmsy
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Won't make a big difference unless you want the peace of mind knowing you've utterly maxed out how fast your system can go.
Plus it's fun and an opportunity to put in some high quality thermal paste like GC Extreme.
Plus it's fun and an opportunity to put in some high quality thermal paste like GC Extreme.
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Is that the best thermal paste? I'm new at this upgrade processor thing.
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3.46 / 3.2 * 100 = 108.125
So a W3690 is at most 8.125% faster than a W3670. When you factor in that they both use the same memory at the same clock speed, that probably means the W3690 is about 6-8% faster. So, no, you wouldn't notice any difference.
If you want a faster machine and haven't already got one, use the money on an SM951. You'd notice that difference.
I didn't think it would make to much difference. A little off the subject, how does the OWCMercury Accelsior E2 Compair to the SM951?
W3670 is limited to 1066 MHz memory. The IO on the W3690 is also faster.
Agreed, though that there are better upgrades.
It's one of the best. There are some that that will cool more but they are typically the liquid metal types and are significantly trickier to apply (and remove). Gelid GC Extreme is the best standard, non-conductive, no-nonsense paste. I used it on my W3690 and Titan X and am very pleased with the results.
SM951 is a lot faster on paper, but you'd only notice a huge difference vs E2 if you use disk-intensive applications.
E2 also gives you 2 eSATA ports, which can be useful if you use a lot of external drives.
E2 uses RAID0 configuration so it's imperative that you have a disciplined backup strategy. I've been through a couple of bad ones with OWC tech support until my current one which has been rock-solid reliable for years.
Recovery partition works fine. RAID0 is completely hidden from the OS under normal circumstances; it's all on the hardware controller. OWC claims it does its own garbage collection and thus doesn't need TRIM (but some on this forum would challenge that claim).
BootCamp won't work [normally] because Macs see PCIe SSDs as external drives (I use a dedicated 2.5" SSD in one of the SATAII slots for BootCamp).
BootCamp won't work [normally] because Macs see PCIe SSDs as external drives (I use a dedicated 2.5" SSD in one of the SATAII slots for BootCamp).