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So which CPU?

[TW]Fox

[TW]Fox

[TW]Fox

Man of Honour
Joined
17 Oct 2002
Posts
160,215
Hi guys,

It's decided - I'm going to buy a CPU for around £100 used to replace my E4300 so I can use the E4300 in another machine. I've read all the Quad core versus Dual Core arguements and to be honest they've left me none the wiser, seems a real issue of contention.

It appears my budget will get me a used Q6600 or Q6700 or a used E8400 or E8500. I intend to overclock whatever CPU I get using aircooling.

Which would you buy and why? Is the Q6700 a better bet over a Q6600 given its higher multiplier?

Machine is used for gaming.

Thank you kindly!
 
not sure what steppings the q6700 come in but you cant go wrong with a q6600 g0 stepping had several now all have done 3-3.2ghz with stock volts etc etc
 
Although the CPU's are not FSB limited is the rest of the system FSB limited? It's pretty hard to chose between them, I've spent ages reading about both and for every pro Q660 post there is another pro E8xxx post instead.
 
[TW]Fox;13077389 said:
Although the CPU's are not FSB limited is the rest of the system FSB limited? It's pretty hard to chose between them, I've spent ages reading about both and for every pro Q660 post there is another pro E8xxx post instead.
Click to expand...
The q6600 has the same multiplier as the e4300, so you already know you'll be able to push it to 3GHz....

Have you tried pushing your FSB any further on your current setup with the multi set to 6x?
 
MikeHunt79 said:
The q6600 has the same multiplier as the e4300, so you already know you'll be able to push it to 3GHz....

Have you tried pushing your FSB any further on your current setup with the multi set to 6x?
Click to expand...
Im currenty using a Q6600, im mainly a gamer, cod4 cod waw and far cry2, got my quad to 3.8ghz stable on air cooling, and its currently wasted as i dont do much video encoding now, quite fancy an E8600 if i can sell the quad at the right price.
 
To me the main question is always going to be "Can you get a higher cpu overclock with a dual core or a quad core? And if you can is the advantage outweighed by the potential for correctly coded games to utilize 4 cores?". I generally think the answer to the first question is yes, pound for pound you will get a higher overclock with a dual. I often hear 4 gig being bandied about on air for the dual, whereas 3.6 is the usual for the quad. The other question is obviously going to be contenious. For me at this moment most games will probably benefit from a the higherclock on the dual. But from scanning forums these days there does seem to be a few more games coming out now which appear to be edgeing towards better utilization of multicores. The way I see it there will eventually be a tipping point in new games where a max overclock quad will equal the performance of a max overclock dual, with the quad ultimately overtaking the dual as the games become better coded. There is no way to tell when this will happen but I would say it will happen one day. The problem is you don't know if it is going to be a very gradual process, or suddenly one day it will click and they will suss out how to properly code multicore games and give a step change in performance. I don't think anyone knows the answer to that, the only certain thing to say imo is that the majority of games at this moment will probably run slightly faster on a max overclock dual.
 
If you're going to be keeping it for sometime, the quad would be better in the long run as more games introduce multi core support. However support is still very slow to come through. At the moment very few games use it, so you'll have a hot running chip not being fully used, compared to a E8400 which is quicker per clock (with more cache) and cooler running.
 
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