Q6600 or E8400??

[Hesky82]

Game wise I saw no difference between my Q6600 running at 4Ghz and my E8400 at 4.5GHz simply because all the games I play are GPU limited, on the whole the E8400 is quicker even in some so called multi threaded app I use.

People tend to blindly recommend quads on here. Right at this moment in time I see no need at all for a Quad, but thats just my opinion. I got the E8400 to try out simply because it was dirt cheap at the time and in many ways I prefer it to the Quad.

 

[Trunks9486]

Get an X38, a Quad(and a decent cooler) and 4GB of RAM, it should be good for at least two years.

The quad should easily be able to reach at least 3.2-3.4 GHz and a good X38 mobo wont have any problems dealing with that. DDR2 800MHz are enough as well

 

[Macro]

Game wise I saw no difference between my Q6600 running at 4Ghz and my E8400 at 4.5GHz simply because all the games I play are GPU limited, on the whole the E8400 is quicker even in some so called multi threaded app I use.

People tend to blindly recommend quads on here. Right at this moment in time I see no need at all for a Quad, but thats just my opinion. I got the E8400 to try out simply because it was dirt cheap at the time and in many ways I prefer it to the Quad.

Agreed. Unless you're doing encoding or some other specialised operations (rendering maybe) a Quad delivers no real advantage over dual core.

If this is your ONLY CPU upgrade for the next 2 or 3 years it could be worth going quad. If you mainly play games I'd be inclined to go with the faster dual core (assuming the average Q6600 hits ~3.5Ghz and you can get a dual core up to 4Ghz+) now and when games start to appear in greater numbers that will really take advantage of a Quad switch then to a much newer (Nalhem?) Quad core that is likely to be significantly quicker than a current Q6600/Q9000 by then.

 

[Namistai]

I would say that it would be worth going with a quad, with carefully selected components. I would normally recommend people to get an 8400, but then most people upgrade more often than once every 2 or 3 years.

Personally, I'd go for a Q6450 and a X38 mobo for PCIe 2.0. I think it would be false economy to go for a lesser mobo now and change it later. This way you'll get the extra cache and what I believe will be a great clocking CPU. Both mobo and CPU will last you for a good 2 or 3 years imo.

Alternatively, you go for a cheaper option and upgrade it more regularly. In which case I'd go down the E2xx0 route and overclock it on a P35 mobo. Save the difference in cash and use it in 12 months to upgrade again This is actually my preferred route as it ties up less cash and gives me the opportunity to rebuild and play with new components!