Quad or duo

[mrmegaman]

hi all
I am thinking of upgrading my cpu and wanted to know what is a good bye, I have a e6600 at the mo on a rampage formula. and have had some great fun with it. got it to 3.2 on air, I have just up graded from a striker extreme to the rampage formula and get much better clock.
I was going to go all out and get the Intel Core 2 Quad Q9650 LGA775 'Yorkfield' 3.0GHz 12MB-cache (1333FSB) Processor. but have done a little research and I have found out that the Intel Core 2 Duo E8600 LGA775 'Wolfdale' "Overclocking E0 Stepping" 3.33GH. has had better bench marks.
I love games and use my pc music and video. I play crysis and gta. at the mo I have to put my e6600 at 3.0 to play them. I also have a 8800 gtx and I am going to upgrade at the same time. I love nvidia so will stay with them and I can only have one card on my board. so what a good upgrade that's not too much.
any way my question is what is the benefit of the quad and will it be better for me o and what is E0 Stepping .
thanks for your time.

 

[mollymoo]

Could be wrong but from what I've read there isn't much out there game wise that will utilise a quad core cpu and if it's gaming that you want to do then a dual core ( unless money is no object ) is the way to go.
Coupled with that Graphics cards again down to money Gtx 250 which is a low power 9800gtx+ or 260 would be good

Just as an afterthought my setup plays everything I've come across on full no problems all bar Crysis Warhead which was on gamer settings but then that is a notoriously hard game to run at full

 

[DIABLO]

Personally i would get the graphics card first then see if the cpu is bottlenecking your system. If it is'nt i would save the money and make a more substantial upgrade to a i7 setup later on.

 

[iraiguana]

Quad generally give an overall smoother system feel. Little actual benefit to games and most programs still though. It does not sound like you would see much gain from that upgrade at the moment.

Your graphics card would give you your biggest noticeable gain from a single upgrade, then as suggested latter on upgrade to i7 or possibly what comes after.

 

[Mattus]

I love games and use my pc music and video.

I'm guessing that's just playing music and video, as opposed to producing/encoding it? If so, the dual is the better choice as it will be faster in games, run cooler and clock higher. If you are encoding video, though, the quad will smoke it.

 

[valdai]

I've got to agree with DIABLO, gpu is probably the bigger bottleneck at the moment and the increase in performance from an overclocked e6600 to another LGA775 cpu is not going to be huge in real terms.

 

[setter]

A new graphics card would be a sound investment, the e6600 is still a pretty potent cpu, no point geting a quad unless you do a lot of video/photo encoding work, very few games at the minute fully utilise quad core cpu's properly.