which is gonna be faster/better ?

[caspertoo]

Looking to buy from cyberpower.com

(Sckt775)Intel® Core™ 2 Duo X6800 Extreme Edition with Factory OverClocked to 3.46GHz EM64T

OR

For $80 less
(Quad-Core)Intel® Core™ 2 Extreme QX6700 @ 2.66GHz 1066FSB 8MB L2 Cache EM64T

Opinions? And on the same subject, is one 8800GTX more than enough for high resolution on most any game in the near future, do I really need SLI with that high end of a card?

Much thanks in advance.

 

[col-p-todd]

The X6800 currently will be better for games and the Q6700 better for video editing. But the Q6700 is more future proof.

So I would go for the Q6700 since the performance difference that the E6800 has is not that much in games, and The Q6700 will last longer.

 

[mpjesse]

I must respectfully disagree with Col-P-Todd. The QX6700 is not a quad core native design. Thus, even when programs are written to take advantage of all 4 cores, they will not perform as well as native quad core designs. Think of it as a Pentium D for multithreaded applications. It'll get the job done, but not very elegantly.

In my opinion, the better bet is the X6800 for two reasons:

1. Overclockability
2. Intel is releasing a native quad core CPU sometime around June of this year... and it's supposed to be killer. It <should> be drop in compatible w/ your board. And you can always resell your X6800 on eBay.

If it were me, I'd wait for a better quad core design from Intel or AMD, which is coming soon to an etailer near you.

 

[epsilon84]

I must respectfully disagree with Col-P-Todd. The QX6700 is not a quad core native design. Thus, even when programs are written to take advantage of all 4 cores, they will not perform as well as native quad core designs. Think of it as a Pentium D for multithreaded applications. It'll get the job done, but not very elegantly.

In my opinion, the better bet is the X6800 for two reasons:

1. Overclockability
2. Intel is releasing a native quad core CPU sometime around June of this year... and it's supposed to be killer. It <should> be drop in compatible w/ your board. And you can always resell your X6800 on eBay.

If it were me, I'd wait for a better quad core design from Intel or AMD, which is coming soon to an etailer near you.

I must disrespectfully disagree with you also.

Firstly, native or non native, if it gets the job done, it works. People keep looking at paper specs instead of real world performance. The QX6700 would spank the X6800 in multithreaded apps easily, native or not.

Contrary to popular misconception, Penryn will still be a non native design - it consists of two 'Wolfdale' cores. Release date is still a toss up - it has ranged from H1 07 to Q1 08 - the truth is probably somewhere in the middle so probably Q3/Q4 07 IMHO.

And Barcelona performance projections are all marketing speak right now trying to raise confidence amongst shareholders. 80% this*, 70% that* (*read the fine print ). I'd rather trust solid benchmark numbers than marketing blabberish.