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Time to save some elec­trons. On yet another whim, I pur­chased a new Intel Q9300 pro­cessor for Gen­eral Melchett, repla­cing the ven­er­able Q6600.

The CPU tem­per­at­ure seems to have dropped by 9degC, whilst the per­form­ance (12Gb video encode using Expres­sion Encoder) is within a mar­gin of error the same. The Q9300 is 4% faster. I think there might be some­thing else at play as the bench­mark res­ults from xbit­labs seems to show 11% or so improvement.

Install­a­tion: 10 minutes; and 6 minutes of this was spent chas­ing screws around before I relen­ted and grabbed a mag­net­ised screw driver. The Zal­man fan makes CPU replace­ment a little more difficult.

I expec­ted that the Gen­eral would have dust through­out. None. The first rear fan’s fil­ter has grabbed the dust bun­nies and holds them steady. w00t!

The strategy is to over­clock the new Q9300 a little; with a lower tem­per­at­ure start­ing point it’s all upside from here!