Price/performance difference and futureproofing

[mpkonig]

Ive been looking for the next processor to upgrade too.....what i want to know is....what is over kill and what is enough to suit me for a year or so.

e6750-- performance is great...and priced around 178 to 200 bucks
e6850-- Performance is great but a little more expensive than e6750
q6600-- its a quad core...whatelse is there to say and priced about the same as the e6850

what i want to know is....is it worth spending the extra 100 bucks to get a quad or the e6850 or is the price/performance of the e6750 too hard to resist. also....is the quad core really going to be utilized that much within the next year or so to warrant enough to buy one now?? i use my comp for mostly gaming.

let me know

 

[Falken699]

Don't bother with a dual-core anymore.

 

[mpkonig]

so pretty much core 2 duo's are dead technology? i just dont want to spend $280 on a quad core that games wont be fully utilizing until '08 and by that time..they have a better quad core for near the same price as the q6600. I know they have multithreaded games out now (oblivion etc.) but how many of them actually fully utilize a quad core and how long will it be until they make games that do so? i see alot of the benchmarks that Tom's has, and the only ones that quad seem to really take charge of are the 3dmark 06'. im not trying to be an *** about things, just want to get the full picture on what is actually needed. i dont really multi-task, i dont much other than play shooters and MMorpg's. just wanted to figure out if an e6750 is a good step for now. Most boards support quad core anyways....and im looking to get either a p35 or an x38 chipset so the ability is there to jump to a quad whenever i want it. Plus im upgrading from an athlon 64 3200+...so really any cpu is a HUGE improvement.

 

[itotallybelieveyou]

nope core 2 duo ares good, core 2 quad is just better and q6600 is cheap now

 

[mpkonig]

hmm....i never thought choosing a damn CPU would be this much of a pain in the arse.

my specs

AMD athlon 64 3200+
1 gig OCZ plat rev 2
Soltek MB (good board....drivers are now picky and restart my comp periodically)
BFG Geforce 6800gt OC
2 38gb WD Raptors Raid Config.
tsunami Dream Case

as you can see....i built this thing about 3 or so years ago...but its now starting to show its age.

Here is what im planning on upgrading to within a month or so

E6750 or Q6600
2 gig crucial ballistix pc-6400
MSI p35 Plat. Rev. 1.1 or Gigabyte Ds3r
EVGA 8800gts 320mb superclocked
2 raptor 38gb raptor raid config.
Antec Nine hundred gamer case
OCZ 650w psu

just need to get the processor down...and also the motherboards are up in the air until i see how the new x38 chipset performs.

as you can see......either processor i pick will be a HUGE (a little more than double the performance) upgrade.

 

[mpkonig]

oh yeah...any helpful tweaks to the new system are welcome too

 

[systemlord]

Its not like not having a quad core is going to hurt your gaming in the next year. The E6750 can OC just as good as a E6850, so save some $$ if you need to. Penryn's are coming out in dual cores and quad cores, so dual cores aren't dead. Remember that its easier to cool a dual core than it is a quad core. I'll upgrage to a quad when Intel uses an on-board memory controller in late 2008 or early 2009.

 

[Maziar]

Q6600 VS E6850 :

http://xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/core2quad-q6600.html
http://anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=3038&p=8

 

[mpkonig]

great articles...thanks maziar

 

[Maziar]

np , glad that i helped

 

[abominator]

I had dilemma of buying q6600 vs e6850 6 weeks ago. I chose q6600. I agree that in most of the current games it would be better to have 2 cores 3ghz instead of 4 cores 2.4ghz but performance increase is too small to notice. If e6850 gives 10% more fps it would be like 110fps vs 100fps or 22fps vs 20fps(for example World in Conflict 1280x1024 dx10 very high settings on my pc with 8800gts640mb sometimes ) so you wouldn't notice a difference. See for example this WiC test especially very high settings - no difference: http://www.bjorn3d.com/read.php?cID=1162&pageID=3901

Now lets see which games use and perform better on quad core (4cores 2.4ghs vs 2cores 2.4ghz or even better):
World in Conflict
Supreme Commander
Lost Planet
Stranglehold !!!! - it showed on my task manager 60-70% overall (2+ cores used!!) - spread regulary over all 4 cores, i would like to see benchmarks with this game 2vs4 cores, i can't disable 2 cores on my mb so i can't check the difference :/

Which games will be using quad core:
Crysis - soon we'll see...
Alan Wake

Unreal Tournament 3 beta demo uses only 2 cores both at 100%
I remember talk that Half-Life 2 - Episode Two support quad. I don't know why in the end there is no difference with 2 or 4 cores. See http://anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3122
I saw in task manager that HL2 EP2 uses 1 core at 90%, 1 at 10%-15% and other two 0-2% so it isn't quad core game!

So there isn't alot of games that support or will support in the future 4 cores but I would recommend q6600 over e6850 for the same price because 3ghz doesn't give noticeable difference and in the future 4 cores will make a difference. Intel plans to release new quad cpus in q1 2008 2.5ghz 1333fps for the same money q6600 costs today so waiting imo is pointless for 100mhz because it would be like 0-5% increase in performance.

 

[o1die]

I'd go for the "go" q6600. Fry's has the q for $268.99 today with free ecs board. Unfortunately, the board may not work properly with the cpu. No cpu support or bios updates are listed for the q series. Fry's does that sometimes to get rid of inventory.

 

[bitrate]

No such thing as "future proofing".

Buy at the best price point and be happy with it.

 

[nukchebi0]

The video card you should hold out on until mid-November.