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

Well the benchmarks only shows one application runing, say you like to game, photoshop and watch a Hd film at the same time, you wont notice the difference.

Basically a quad is good for video editing. if you get the e6750 you can overlock that beast to 4ghz or around that, and play games do what you want, as soon as you start encoding video that kinda thing then the quad will be ahead. I had to make the same choice get the quad or the e6850 i got the e6850 as the gaming benchmarks shows the dual is better, due to the higher clock speed.

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.

Go for the Q6600 or the e8400 instead of the e6750. The e6750 isn't bad at all, but for the price you're better of with the e8400.

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

thanks all, i'm def going to be looking at the 8400 now, its cheaper and better. I was up til the wee hours after listening to your advice reading this article, and you chaps might be interested toohttp://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/intel-wolfdale.html

What MB are you going for BTW?

Wel, thats just changed twice since i started this thread, lol, and i'm not buying the chip and MB for another 5 weeks, so who knows, but right now i'm looking at reviews for Gigabyte GA-N650SLI-DS4L NF650i SLi (say that with your dentures out). It takes the chip and is SLI for a good price, but again, any advice, many thanks

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 would go with a Q6600 myself. I generally upgrade once every three years, and a quad will last longer than a dual.

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.

its always easier to go bug someone (to the above poster) .

I am not gonna buy a quadcore this year, simply because there's this one application that give you more marks of you have 4 cores.
game coders are more mainstream market oriented and mainstream right now is 2 cores, not 4.

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.

Some games are starting to take advantage of quad core systems. Some examples are Supreme Commander (more threads = higher unit cap), Crysis (the game still lags) and some up and comming releases.