E6750 or Q6600, any advice please ?

I'm returning to serious gaming after 2 years away and i am having a new custom PC built. Please bear in mind the whole 'duo' and 'quad' thing is new to me. Now, i can get an Intel Quad Core Q6600 for a mere £30 ($60) more than a Core 2 Duo E6750. On paper i thought this looked a bargain, but after looking at Tom's charts and comparisons on futuremark i fail to see the extra money being well spent, if at all. the MB i am looking at buying can take either CPU.

Thanks for reading and thanks for any help

Both overclock really good. You can take the e6750 to 3.6-4GHz and the q6600 to 3.2-3.6GHz. I would always go for more cores.
If your mobo supports it you could take a look at e8400 overclocks to 4GHz easily.

i agree, 8400 as long as your mobo supports it, which it probably should if it could use a 6750. i love my 6750, but you'll get probably 300-500 more megahertz out of the 8400, not that it matters for gaming, but you'll feel more manly

What MB are you going for BTW?

I'd still go quad core.

When one to two year old games don't use more than 2 cores, but show up "winning" CPU benchmarks, then we have to take a step back and compare that to how a very recent release performs when more than two cores are put into play. If you look at Supreme Commander, it shows that quad core will provide overall performance boosts in the future, probably as soon as holiday 2008 releases.

Just look at the benchies for Supreme Commander and then extrapolate next year and the year after:

http://www.tomshardware.com/2008/0 [...] page6.html

Even the Agena beats a few Wolfdales and Conroes, as well as X2. The Kentsfield beats both the Agena and a few Wolfdales and one Conroe that also beat Agena.

If you also do applications, well the Wolfdale review shows that even the lowly Agena 9600 is midway in the pack on many apps, so those applications benchmark even better with a Q6600. A 3.0 Wolfdale is tops in your price range, but if you don't plan to upgrade for a couple of years, then a Q6750 is a no brainer.

Feeling more manly? Great advice By your own estimate, having a 6750 would make you feel, what? More womanly? More like one of the Donahues in "Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death"? Do you go around offering doilies while intoning "Alan Alda"?

Does anyone really think that holiday 2008 games won't follow Supreme Commander's lead and use more than 2 cores? My prediction is that even a B3 Phenom will beat many more Wolfdales in December 2008 releases. So, a Q6600 or Q6750 will do even better.

Sometimes, I think the "enthusiasts" here give advice based only on the highest benchmark in a year or so old FPS plus how they overclock their favorite processor with water cooling. Not very practical advice. Me, I try to look at trends over the average time a processor is kept before upgrading, and I can't see that being less than two years.

I had this problem too, but was going to choose between the E8400 and Q9450. In the end I got the Q6600 as quad core is more future proof and couldn't wait until April / May for the Q9450.

Ultimately for gaming it's the GPU that you put in your computer which effects framerates which is why I got a Geforce 8800GTS 512Mb which I'm really pleased with.

Yes, with all things being equal extra clockspeed on the CPU can give you up to 10% more framerates but as other posters have mentioned you can always overclock your CPU which is what I plan to do at a later date.

Ill go with the E6750 like you just said its for gaming and games do loves dual core chip better than a quad .save those few bucks on a higher end videocard.

The E6750 is used to its max potential as just about all current programs take advantage or dual core. Very few on the other hand take much more than half the power of the Q6600. The extra money will show benefits once programs currently being developed arrive. One Q6600 has the same potential as 2 E6750 minus some over head performance for tasking. For a while this played out between the single and dual cores but as more programs took more advantages of the 2 cores the single cores just couldn't keep up. At 1 point the A64 3500 was an equal to the X2 4200 but programs have change with the high end single cores cant even match low end duals. We are currently in the middle of this again.

Here is some benchmarks but pay attention to the last one as more games will get optimized for the quad you will see these benchmarks change for quad. These benchmarks are done without many things you would have running like virus detection and software firewalls which the Q6600 will limit the effects.
http://xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/d [...] 600_8.html

The only CPU's i would suggest over the Q6600 are those with great savings like the 2160~2180.

I hope you enjoy you're new system. Happy gaming!