E2180 or Q6600 for another 1.5 years?

[kppanic]

Everything else equal, (4GB RAM, P35 mobo, HD4870/comparable card)

would an OC'd Q6600 be a better choice for a system to hold out for about 1.5 years (time until the new mainstream Nehalem hits the market)
or would it be better to get an E2160 and OC it to hell?

The price is:
Q6600 CAD$234.99 +13%tax = $265.54 (£132.41 as of 06 jun 08)

E2180 CAD$77.99 +13%tax = $88.13 (£43.93 as of 06 jun 08)

Wondering if I would end up having to upgrade the E2180 mid way for performance issues... It will be used for gaming mainly.

Worded differently, if I were to get an E2180 and decide to juice it for 1.5 years, would I be pulling my hair out of my sockets? I heard Q6600 is pretty much unbeatable when it comes to performance, as it can take almost anything we throw at it. I am not interested in the top FPS department.

It's only an extra ~£90 or so, but I really am looking for a budget build on this end - estimated allocated budget is at CAD$1000 (£500 approx)

Oh, and the Q6600 has the number (BX80562Q6600) beside it, I can only guess this is the serial number. Is this batch a good OC candidate?

Cheers in advance!

 

[kppanic]

q6600

end thread

Thanks.

 

[kppanic]

E7200

Price for E7200 is $149.99 + 13%tax or £81.64

If i were to get this, would I need 6400 RAM or 5300 would be sufficient on a P35 mobo?

Sorry for the very "noobish" questions but my current system is a P4 Prescott 3.6... So when i say E2180 or E7200 or Q6600 I have absolutely no frame of reference for the speed comparison. I can only go by what others say, and I've heard that E2180 OC'd to about 3.0~3.2GHz pretty much does everything well incl games, and in my mind I say to myself "why get a Q or an E7xxx or E8xxx when the cheapest E2xxx does everything good?"

Cheers in advance.

 

[kppanic]

Any of those above will absolutely demolish a P4...

Haha I was just waiting for someone to say that

...but what's going to be good for another 1.5yrs or so is a bit trickier. I have been playing with a E2180 this week and got it to 3.6Ghz prime stable. It is a fantastic little chip and flies at that speed. Get it to 3Ghz and above and it's a very capable cpu. Will it still be good in 1.5yrs? Probably.

The E7200 is the favourite "budget" clocker at the moment. Personally i don't call almost £90 budget but that's just me. It is a good cpu though and has more cache than the E2180 although it's twice the price. It is more likely to still be able to cope in 1.5yrs time though.

The Q6600 is one of Intels first Quads and can clock to 3.4-3.6Ghz. Mine went to 3.8Ghz. If you do lots of multitasking or use multithreaded aps such as video and photo editing software then a quad would be a safe bet. If gaming however it would be a total waste as barely any games make use of it. It is also a lot hotter running and a lot more power hungry than the other two.


PC2-5300 will not be good enough for the E7200 or Q6600. You could probably get away with it for the E2180 if you have a motherboard with a decent choice of memory multiplier settings. 6400 would be better though.

Cheers for an awesome response;

I am not that knowledgeable or adventurous in the OC - I would def. do some easy OC'ing like multiplier change but changing volts or adding water cooling are out of my reach.

I would not be able to get E2180 running @ 3.6GHz. Best I could do is 3.0 or maybe if I get lucky with the hardware 3.2 max.

As for E7200, I think I'd get the E2180 and drop a little more on the GPU if possible.

Q6600... I think my next upgrade path will be mid-range quad Nehalem in 1.5 years, so I don't think I'd be getting that.

I am trying to gauge performance in terms of Crysis. Although I've never even attempted to download the demo and try it on my Prescott (forgive my sin) but I think in about a year if I have a gaming rig that could decently run Crysis at 75% detail I'd have a pretty good system considering how little money I am trying to spend. I am more confident after your answer that E2180 will be able to pull this off with perhaps next gen graphics card such as HD4870.

Unless I am horribly mistaken, I am ready to down my money on:
E2180
Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L
Corsair XMS2 TWIN2X4096-6400C5
HD4870
Corsair TX Series TX650W.

until Q4 2009.

 

[kppanic]

...

However, what is the resolution you intend on gaming at?. If it is 1280x1024 or below then I'd maybe think about the E7200 as the extra CPU speed would help such a low resolution. If 1680x1050 then the 3-3.2Ghz you are expecting from the E2180 should suffice. Please have a mess with the voltages up to 1.5Ghz with the E2180 as it's all about heat, these CPU's can take 1.5v no problem.

...

I don't get this part: if 3.0 - 3.2GHz E2180 is ok for 1680x1050+ res, wouldn't it handle 1280x1024 nicely too? Extra cache/speed would def. help in any situation, but why would E7200 be especially useful in low res gaming? I have 2 19" LCDs but come the Christmas time it'll get to be 22". So i'm guessing 1680x1050 gaming for me.

I will try 1.5v max and prime it for 24/7 stability. In other cases, I'd say "ahh if I blow this CPU I'll just get another one" but that defeats the whole purpose of going budget to try and save money

I'm happy with my E2180 but if games start needing more cores then I'll have to get a quad. Simple as that. Only UT3 and Supreme Commander (that I can think of) will show an increase with quad core. I've not played Supreme Commander on this rig but I do know that UT3 runs great . Even the brand new Grid racing title from Codemasters runs flawlessly with every setting maxed out at 1600x1200 and 1920x1200 (only had it two days).

Go for it and it enjoy unless you have a low resolution. Then the E7200 and the greater clock speed might be the better option although a little more expensive.

Glad to know that high-res gaming is not only viable but actually very enjoyable on a [email protected]+ GHz. Hopefully HD4870 is within the speculated price range and if it does as good as an 8800GTX, I can't lose!

 

[kppanic]

Yeah, bang for bucks the E2180 is great but the op is asking will it last a year and a half.

Personally my quad off the bay for £90 running at 3.6Ghz is also great bang for bucks as well IMO plus with the extra cache and ignoring use of all 4 cores, will be quicker than your E2180 anyway.

Buy the E2180 for £35 if you plan to change cpu again in 6 months and buy a E8200 or E8400 cheaply 2nd hand and keep doing that every 6 months or so.

Hmm.. I've never thought about picking up a CPU off on EBay... Is this a safe practice??

 

[kppanic]

It will at lower res too but at lower res the games become cpu limited
not gpu limited.

For example you may have a game at 1680 x 1050 which runs at 50 fps but it is been limited by your gpu. At 1280 x 1024 with a E2180 it might then run at 100 fps and be cpu limited and if you had a 4Ghz E8400 it might run at 200 fps at that res but unless you are a dedicated fps gamer who have even been known to run games at 800 x 600 to get 300-400 fps then it isn't really going to matter at all.

Hope that explains that well enough

Thanks for the explanation, just as I thought
Ahhhhhhh I am going to get an E2180 I think, with a GA-P35-DS4L. If I could have held on with a P4 for 4 years, I think I can chill with an E2180 for a year and a half.

And I never understood the advantage of having extra FPS on a... well.. FPS..

I mean... anything over 100+ fps is really an overkill, no?

 

[kppanic]

I didnt notice any speed increase in games going from 1.8ghz to 3.2ghz

I run it at 2.8ghz and have since i bought it the day the e6300 came out.

Save your money on a quad, buy a dual and buy better ram and mboard.

I went from a 1.73ghz athlon and at 1.8ghz the e6300 slaughtered it in everything!

Wahh?

 

[kppanic]

Ummm... I just read this...

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Intel-Nehalem-Kuma,5642.html

If this is the case, and Mainstream Nehalem hits the market at the same time as an Extreme Nehalem, there is no point in trying to hold for 1.5 years any longer!! It's more like 6-8 more months now, which is a great news!

Since Nehalem would mean a new MB, I really need to go cheapy cheapy, I.E. E2180 and get 6400 DDR2 I guess...

Oh and BTW... Poor AMD...

 

[kppanic]

I said that back in post #35. A good budget rig would be a E2160 or E2180, 2Gb PC2-6400 and a Gigabyte P31 DS3L. That's a solid backbone of a pc for around £120.

And on top of everything the news basically obliterates any need to get a Q6600 today.

Yay!!

 

[kppanic]

God, some people just aren't happy.

I still thought you wanted a pc for a year and half not because that is how long before nehalem comes out but how long before you have saved up for one or they have dropped in price or I would have said that about 20 posts ago

If you are looking at going nehalem on launch I would expect to pay the following:

£300-£400 for the overclockable nehalem
£150-£250 for the motherboard
plus whatever stupid premium ddr3 memory is still at over ddr2 say £100 for 2gb or really £200 for 4Gb to do the nehalem justice

Therefore total mobo,cpu,ram cost will be £550 - £850.

That's why I'm not going nehalem for another year and a half

Hey you don't tell me what I want! lol

You are probably right, either system I get I would cling onto it for at least 1.5 years no matter what I say haha...

It's just that I can tell the little voice on the back of my head that kept on saying "get a quad get a quad get a quad" but now I can finally tell it to shut it.