E6400 vs E6300

[soulskorpion]

I'm in the process of deciding what components to get for a new computer. I've chased down benchmarks and compared them against prices, and I had decided on buying an E6400 for $365 (AUD). Then I noticed the E6300 for $269, which I'd overlooked because there weren't benchmarks for it at the above link (which I was using as my main source of information).

I've done some reading up on other sites and found some other benchmarks comparing overclocked versions of the E6400 and E6300 with stock ones and a few other CPUs. To my untrained eye, the E6400 doesn't look like performs all that much better than the E6300 considering that it's nearly $100 more expensive. As far as I understand the E6400 is excellent for overclocking, but I'm not going to be overclocking (I don't know the first thing about OCing, wouldn't know where to start and don't want to run the risk of &$%#ing up a brand new CPU).

Basically, is it worth spending the extra money and getting the E6400? I'm likely to be doing CPU intensive stuff with the machine (such as running virtual machines), possibly also running modern games (my collection is several years out of date at the moment). The higher the performance the better (for the price), but would the extra cost actually get me noticeably more performance?

 

[godman]

i believe that it is worht spending the extra money if youre not overclocking, as this wil mean faster performance at stock, and if in the future you want to overclock then it should overclock better/easier due to its higher multiplier (meaning you wouldnt have to increase the fsb as much, thus fsb and strain on the motherboard will be more relaxed.)

i believe that the 6400 is as fast as the x2 4200 or x2 4400.

 

[godman]

sorry yeah youre right i was only thinking off my head:
http://tomshardware.co.uk/cpu/charts.html?modelx=33&model1=433&model2=468&chart=189

 

[soulskorpion]

Thanks for the advice, everyone.