E6700 or x6800--Please Help

[pongrules]

I'm about to put together a system and I'm having a hard time justifying the extra $500 for a processor that's 270 mhz faster. I'm not very comfortable with overclocking as I've never done it before, but I want a system that's going to play every game on the highest settings. The rest of my system will look like the following:

eVGA 680 sli motherboard
Corsair twin 2x2048 - 6400C4 DDR2800 XMS2 Extreme
eVGA 8800 GTX
WD 150 gb 10,000 rpm

The goal for my system is to buy the best now so that I'm expandable into the future. The motherboard will do SLi in x16 even though I plan to get only one videocard--when I can afford it, I can put another 8800 GTX in there. The board supports quad CPU's if I decide to put the money down for one of those. The vid card will do DX10 when it comes out and is compatible with Vista whenver the time comes when I absolutely have to make the switch from XP.

So based on this information, is it work getting the x6800 over the E6700?

 

[ajfink]

Get an E6400 (or E6300...?) or E6600 and another 8800 and you will be much happier. Overclocking, btw, is excruciatingly simple, and both the E6400 and E6600 rock for it.

 

[darkstar782]

What monitor are you going to use?

Unless you have a 24" widescreen (1920x1200) or bigger, a single GTX is enough for anything today.

The CPU has relatively little impact on gaming performance, if gaming is what you need there is relatively little to justify an e6700 over an e6600 or e6300.

An e6300 and 2*8800GTX makes more sense than an x6800 and 1*8800GTX for games, the only high end C2D that I really see the point in is the QX6700 to be honest, and I say that as someone that bought a "high end" C2D

 

[pongrules]

Yeah, definitely one 8800 GTX is more than enough video card power by itself. I'm going to be using a 19" monitor, standard size, to answer that question.

So, an E6300 is even enough processor power to play every game at the highest level of detail with everything maxed out even without OC'ing? I can learn how to do some OC'ing, but like I stated earlier, it's not really my thing. I'm also thinking about games that will come out in the next year or two.

 

[Heyyou27]

Well, if you were going to get an X6800, you'd be better off to throw in the extra $49 to get the QX6700.

 

[pongrules]

That's true. But the biggest price break is between the x6800 and the E6700 and so I'm trying to determine if the E6700 or even the E63, E64, E66 will fulfill my need to play games at the highest settings with everything maxed out.

 

[NoBudgetMan]

Consider waiting for the the next Quad-Core CPU to come out. The Q6600 (or is it QE6600?) will be out shortly... it'll be less expensive then the QX6700.

Dual core: E6400 or E6600; remember that even the E6300 is about an equal to what's around in high-end for AMD.
Quad core: QE6600 if you can wait, QX6700 if you can't.

Be warned that some multi-core fixes are only dual-core fixes; there might be a few games you want that doesn't support quad-core.

 

[darkstar782]

In my opinion the e6700 is pointless, and I say that as the owner of one.

If you really don't want to overclock, get an e6600. The price difference between the e66 and e67 is silly.

But really, C2D is *so* overclockable its not even funny, especially the e63.

Its like Intel finished the C2D, realised the slowest ones were going to be capable of 3GHz and would be so far ahead of AMD that it wasn't worth it, so instead they clocked it at 1.83GHz, knowing that C2D had enough headroom that even if they stopped developing it now they could keep releasing higher clocked versions for the next 2 years :/

 

[pongrules]

OK, I've been talked out of the x6800 because I can always upgrade to a quad CPU later anyway. But if I'm following correctly, the E67 and E66 are very close (200 mhz) with no OC'ing.

Given the fact that these are so OC'able, I may try OC'ing and will definitely be back here for help with that.

Anybody got recommendations for cooling? From the research I've done, it looks like folks recommend after market cooling for these processors.

 

[dsidious]

My 2 cents: go for the E6400 or E6600 now. Upgrade to QX6700 2 years from now when it's only $400 or so. By then a lot of software will be able to use multithreading and take advantage of multiple cores. I work in software development and we've got this as a major requirement for the next release...

I loved the comment about "overclocking is excruciatingly simple". Could somebody please post a link to some "idiot's guide" or "overclocking for dummies" page. I think lots of us newbies would find it useful.

 

[darkstar782]

For the e6300, its pretty much as simple as:

1. Set CPU Voltage to 1.4v in BIOS
2. Set PCI clock to 33MHz, PCIe to 100MHz (some bioses may call this "locked")
3. Set FSB to 333MHz
4. Set RAM to 1:1 or 666MHz
5. Save and exit.

Assuming DDR2-667 RAM that is.

Thats 2.33GHz, just 66MHz from e6600 speed, and the odds are you can get it to go much faster than that.

There is a good guide in the CPU overclocking forum.

 

[darkstar782]

I tell ya what, I'll drop the multiplier on my CPU to x7 and see what difference it makes to benchmarks I'll post back in 30 mins or so.

 

[pongrules]

Thank you!!!

 

[pongrules]

Isn't DDR2-800 memory the standard? What's DDR2-667?

 

[BaronMatrix]

I'm about to put together a system and I'm having a hard time justifying the extra $500 for a processor that's 270 mhz faster. I'm not very comfortable with overclocking as I've never done it before, but I want a system that's going to play every game on the highest settings. The rest of my system will look like the following:

eVGA 680 sli motherboard
Corsair twin 2x2048 - 6400C4 DDR2800 XMS2 Extreme
eVGA 8800 GTX
WD 150 gb 10,000 rpm

The goal for my system is to buy the best now so that I'm expandable into the future. The motherboard will do SLi in x16 even though I plan to get only one videocard--when I can afford it, I can put another 8800 GTX in there. The board supports quad CPU's if I decide to put the money down for one of those. The vid card will do DX10 when it comes out and is compatible with Vista whenver the time comes when I absolutely have to make the switch from XP.

So based on this information, is it work getting the x6800 over the E6700?

The 6700 will do fine. OCing is really easy. Just turn up the FSB in the BIOS to 300MHz. I could never pay that much for a processor either and next year you can get a cheaper quad core chip.

 

[pongrules]

Thanks, BaronMatrix. Do you agree with some of the posters here that even the E6600 is a great processor. Obviously, you're going to be able to OC the E6700 higher, but the E6600 still has 4 mb cache.

 

[NotAPimecone]

Obviously, you're going to be able to OC the E6700 higher

Actually, looking through that xtremesystems "world record" thread, the best OC's of the E6600 and the E6700 are neck-and-neck (5103.3 and 5142.43). The current results in the first post show a (very) slight advantage for the E6700, but on the last page there is a recent submission of an E6600 at 5399.87MHz.

And unless you're prepared to spend a ridiculous amount on cooling and RAM to reach those speeds, you won't be getting much further than 3.6-4GHz on either anyway.

 

[darkstar782]

Obviously, you're going to be able to OC the E6700 higher,

Actually the x10 multiplier puts the 380-400MHz FSB 'Black Hole' on 975x and P965 chipsets right in the most annoying place possible, but as you are looking at nForce 680i thats not relevent.

e6600 and e6700 overclocks are very similar.

Still, on to the results. Firstly, 3Dmark06 is stupid, and doesnt seem to take multipliers into account. Hence when my CPU is running at 266x7=1.86GHz, as confirmed by BIOS, CPU-Z, and scores, 3Dmark06 thinks it is at 2.66GHz. Go figure...

Also 3Dmark06 puts alot of emphasis on the CPU tests imho, which are not relevant to gameplay, but anyway:

Synthetic e6320 8583 points.

Synthetic e6600 10423 points.

Stock e6700 speeds 11015 points.

Finally, a result I had earlier:
3.6GHz (360x10) 12232 points.

The last one is with earlier drivers, and I think different GPU speeds (was ages ago!) so probably not that comparable.

Here is an overall view


Anyway, my analysis:

Yes, there is a significant difference in overall scores, however look at the breakdowns. The CPU test shows, as expected, the e6320 way behind. (an e6320 is an e6300 with 4mb cache)

However, the other tests show the margin much closer. Indeed, the margin between the 2.4GHz e6600 and the 3.6GHz overclock is tiny tbh :/ I think the reason the 3.6GHz overclock pulls away in the Canyon flight test is because the GPU was running faster, I really should rerun that test....

Also, numbers cannot show what happened on the screen. While the e6320 settings reduced the max FPS I saw, the min FPS wasnt much lower. Take the first test for example, while at 3.6GHz it starts at around 90FPS, and drops as low as 30 in parts, at 1.86GHz it starts around 60FPS, and drops to around 28 in parts.

If this were a real game, I'd be running with Vsync anyway, so it would be capped at 60FPS. I think this would make the scores much closer, indeed I might try that later.

Now, any of these CPUs will easily run at 3GHz. At that speed, the result would be somewhere between the e6700 results and the 3.6GHz results.

Given that final fact, I wish I had just gone for an e6300!

My opinion is that the extra $$ spent on the e6700 would be better spent on the other parts of the system, like a WD Raptor HDD maybe. If you have nothing else in the system to improve however, you may as well go for a faster CPU.

While there can be an argument for an e6600 over an e6300 (4MB cache), there is no argument for an e6700 over an e6600 imho.

Still the choice is yours, and you can draw your own conclusions from this

No cats were harmed in the making of these benchmarks

 

[pongrules]

(bows down to darkstar782). Thank you so much for taking the time to do this. Very informative. I think I'll be going with the e6600. I might call on you to help me with overclocking when I get the processor if that's OK. Probably about a month and a half out. Who knows, by then maybe the Q6700 will be $500. :lol: