Hi,

I asked in this forum a couple of weeks ago of what cpu to buy. The thing is I wont be buying before in 1-2 weeks no matter what I decide on.

My last question was about E6750 vs. Q6600. I ended up deciding on Q6600.

But now as I at some retailers claiming they have the Q9450 at the end of january I am a lot in doubt

The problems/questions are then:

1) Is the price increase of the Q9450 worth it over the Q6600?

2) I am not much into overclocking, so Im only up for moderate overclocking. I was planning to set a Q6600 at around 3 ghz, so will all the fuss about a low muiltiplier on Q9450 be any trouble to me at all?

3) The last thing is that the Q9450 could end up not getting released in january and maybe I will have to wait till march. Since I'm not much up for this, there's also the new dual cores. Some reviews only states ~1% performance increase of the E8400 vs. E6750 (http://en.expreview.com/?p=68&page=5), other ppl says around 10%. What to believe? I am tempted to say that if I decided on Q6600 over E6750 i should also take it over E8400 given the small improvement?

I made a new thread since I think it would be really nice with some fresh opinions, and the old thread is apparently gone. I find it quite difficult to decide on this

The best cpu in the world is VIA C7, i suggest you buy that.

huh?

VIA rocks

Q9450 especialy if it comes out next week!!!!!

budget....sub 300 you really can't beat the q6600 in my opinion.

Moderate OC is all you'll need, spend the rest of the dough elsewhere in the system.

That said, i still think the VIA C7 is the best for his system.

Cyrix ownes VIA

No, VIA own cyrix, cyrix went into liquidation in the late 90's and VIA bought the x86 license off them to produce cpu's

Sorry, I meant owns as in ownage.

OOHHHhhhh i see, yeah the pwn

I want a Via C7 to see how far i can overclock it. Apparently they're great if you want a VERY low power build.

What will you use the cpu for? If you will be doing mostly gaming, then a duo is good enough. The extra clock speed is more useful than two extra cores. spend any extra cash on a better vga card. If your use is heavy computing, rendering, folding, etc, or even flight simulatorx, then a quad is better.

If your mobo can take a 45nm processor, then I would go for that. It will be a small bit faster, clock for clock. In addition, it will run cooler, take less power, and probably overclock better.

The VIA C7 is only two gigorz. Certainly fastar than AMDs phenom, but not much else...

Honestly get it out of your mind that the 9*&^ Intel series chips will be released anytime soon. Intel has absolutely no plans to release a newer faster chip than what they already have out when there isnt even a stint of competition. You wont see intel procs for awhile IMO and I would bet on it if I were a gambling man.

You will see Q6600 prices drop substantially before intel released chips as to reduce supply on those chips and make room for new chips... basic marketing principles that we have all seen for ages now.

Dude, but I am a gamblin man! How about $100 ten to one that Yorkies up to Q9550 come out by Mar. 31? Heck how about $1,000 at twelve to one?

Maybe I forgot to mention some things in my original post. I am buying a completely new PC, so everything will be new. No existing motherboard etc. to take into the considerations.

I will primarily choose cpu based on gaming, but to be honest I'm not the one having my system up to date all the time, because I only play the big multiplayer-hits on PC (like COD4, mmorpg's like wow etc.) and there can be years between titles like this. The rest goes to my xbox (adventure games etc.). Not that I don't like PC gaming, but I won't pay the price to keep all my hardware up to date all the time.

So the primary object of gaming right now is COD4 and in the future maybe some of the upcoming mmorpgs like Age of Conan or Warhammer Online.

I assume the Q6600 will be more than enough to handle the mentioned games? So my thought was: Why not just take a quad core if 1) It can run todays games fine 2) It has the potential of being better in the future?

Besides gaming I also use photoshop, ocasionally I edit home-videos and maybe in the future I will use it for some physics simulations.

Answer: Because the Q6600 costs more then a dual core that will be even faster. Sure, in a few years the games you are playing may run better on four cores so you can either by current four core proc like the q6600 at a substantially reduced price or, and more likely, you will want a new video card, new ram, MB, cpu, etc...

I build a new computer every 2-3 years. Every system I have built I have tried to future proof it, and every system I have built wasn't future proofed. Something always changes that makes me want to start with new core components.

Buy a q6600 if you want, but I am building a system for the same general type of use as you and I am going with the e8400 and putting the extra money into my pocket.

I would definitely get a quad core. Cyrsis and other upcoming titles have been proven to utilize all four cores and benefit from having the extra cores. You may think that a comparable dual core would be faster than a quad but that's just not going to be the case in a few months from now. Remember when everyone thought the same thing when a dual core came out... people were thinking that just because right now the single cores are outperforming the duals in games that it would stay like that for awhile but sure enough the dual cores surpassed the singles in performance very quickly.
It's not about future proof... it's about getting the best proc for the money and right now the best proc for the money hands down is the Q6600 with the GO stepping. That's what I recommend and that's what I would buy if I were building right now.

I agree with hughyhunter, I just upgraded my E6750 to a Q6600 G0. Its now running at 3.4Ghz. So far I play all my games about the same as my E6750 overclocked at 3.4, but...now my cpu never reaches 100% load even with tons of other background programs. The E6750 is always reaches 100%. If I were you go with a quad so you can play game and do other things in the background. There hasnt been any comparison between the new E8400 and the Q6600 yet but I'm pretty sure the quad will still beat the E8400 in my multi tasking applications. Gaming maybe the E8400 will win but only with dual core for sure.

I'm going for the Q9450 mainly because of the lower heat and double cache. In most benchmarks the q6600 needs 200 more mhz to to make up for the cache difference.