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Which CPU?

DevilBoy916

DevilBoy916

DevilBoy916

Associate
Joined
8 Jan 2007
Posts
169
Hiya guys

I am about to order a P35 mobo, a 8800GTS 512mb, 4GB Geil Ram.
I was going to get the Q6600 processor, as everyone seems to have these, and 4 cores is very tempting, and sounds fast!

I will be playing games a lot (COD4 and Crysis), as well as the usual webbing, and downloading etc...

I suppose I could move up slightly on my processor budget, perhaps to £300ish.

Can anyone recommend a brilliant processor, that will improve my gaming experience for many moons to come?
I am planning on overclocking slightly, with a Tuniq cooler, or maybe a Thermalright 120 Extreme...

Cheers in advance for the advice, and sorry if this has been asked!
DB
 
I was thinking about the E8400...

But I am planning on keeping this PC for at least a year before the next upgrade.
So maybe quad core will be more future proof?

Would it be a good idea to fork out on one of the higher MHz Quads perhaps?
 
If all you do is game then go for the E8200/E8400. If you plan on playing games as well as multitasking + video encoding then a quad is a better choice. Both overclocks well but the E8*** series overclocks like monsters provided you have a decent mobo.
 
steve258 said:
If all you do is game then go for the E8200/E8400. If you plan on playing games as well as multitasking + video encoding then a quad is a better choice. Both overclocks well but the E8*** series overclocks like monsters provided you have a decent mobo.
Click to expand...

What are the decents mobos?
 
E8***s have relatively low multi so you need a mobo that's capable of 500Mhz+ FSB speed. Generally Intel P35 chipsets mobos should be able to achieve this, variants of ASUS P5K & Gigabyte P35-DS3 are very popular.

*EDIT* obviously it only applies if you intend to max out overclocks on the CPU.
 
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from a well know auction site you can get a great deal on a QX6850 around your budget if you haggle hard!

Mine will be here next week.

khushy
 
I am thinking that it might future proof my new build more if i get a quad 6600.
I am planning on clocking it to over 3ghz if I can.

So I am guessing this will keep me gaming for a good year yet. Especially if new games offer quad support.

OR, is this new Dual Core processor thats coming out next week the mutts nutts?

Looking at the top FPS for crysis on this site, a lot of the top machines have Q6600's.
The others have the intel extreme processors, which are way out of my price range.
 
Steve 258 pretty much hit the nail on the head imo. If your gonna stretch your budget for anything i would probably put the extra cash into the video card. Most of those guys with the top Crysis scores have spent a pretty penny in every part in their machine and would wager they all have a pretty close to if not top of the line video card.

If it were me I would probably go for a E8xx for the 45nm and the extra cache and buy a good after market cooler and overclock the snot out of it and beef up my vid card. For mostly gaming a dual core will treat you right for several years to come imo.
 
DevilBoy916 said:
Looking at the top FPS for crysis on this site, a lot of the top machines have Q6600's. The others have the intel extreme processors, which are way out of my price range.
Click to expand...

Look again next week and the top of the chart will be dominated by E8*** series at 4.5Ghz ;)

But then again the prices of one of these is similar/more than the cost of a Q6600 G0 so you're not exactly saving any money towards your video card by going for the E8***. A lot of people got this purely for overclocking fun and insane benchmark scores. Either way you can't go wrong tbh. But IMO a quad is a better all rounder.
 
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you will notice no "real world" difference with clocks over 3.2 / 3.4 Ghz, game performance atm is very much limited by GPU not CPU performance.. The only difference you will notice with post 3.4 Ghz clocks is bench mark performace, and e-penis enlargement
 
Hmmm.

I am planning on getting a 512mb GTS for now. And perhaps upgrading later in the year if the performance starts to drop, to one of the 9800 cards.

Steve528 - Are you saying that the Crysis Benchmarks will be dominated by the new wolfdales?
 
Pretty much yes, but by how much we'll have to find out next week. When the wolfdales are clocked to 4.5Ghz there is simply no competition, especially when crysis is not known for utilising multi-cores. In majority of games Ghz is king. However when you are running high details at high resolution the difference becomes less noticeable as Graphics card becomes the bottleneck.
 
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