If your going Intel the Q6600 seams to offer the best option atm. It will game decent out of the box and offers future upgrades via an OC. My only question is are you up for OCing that rig in a year to keep up?
Message edited by jerseygamer on 03-03-2008 at 07:39:43 PM
The only OC'ing I've done in the past was some fooling around with my 800MHz AMD Duron.. If it's easily done with no aftermarket-cooler I could probably OC it a bit, unless it runs too hot on standard cooling?
What about the - Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 3.0GHz 1333Mhz Socket LGA775, 4MB, BOXED though, why is it more expensive than E8400?
The e6850 is basically just more expensive to make, and they won't cut prices a lot because they want to get rid of them. It's definitely not worth more than the e8400, but when I was building and couldn't get an e8400 myself, I considered picking up an e6xxx on eBay. If you can get something in that line for ~$130 - ~$160, it wouldn't be a bad deal. In the end, I found an e3110 (literally the exact same as the e8400, rebranded as a "server" chip, if you can even find them anymore) for $180 on buy.com, but people have since caught on and they're up to e8400 price levels most of the time. Still, another option if you can find one.
It's not quite on par, but it's not far away. In real-life you probably wouldn't notice a difference between them at stock. But the e8400 overclocks better, and has a bigger cache. If the e6850 was slightly cheaper than the e8400 it might be worthwhile, since the e8400 probably won't be readily available for a while. Check out the e6750, it's a step down but was considered the chip to get by many before the e8400 came out. It should be cheaper than both by quite a bit. And the q6600 is very worthwhile depending on the price where you are. Not sure about Norway, but in US dollars the e6750 usually costs around 190, the e8400 SHOULD cost between 190 - 230, the q6600 ~250, and the e6850 I'm not even sure, as I've never really considered it a good value. If you're looking at those two options that you posted, I would go with the q6600.
Unlucky you... I ordered my E8400 last Thursday from Novatech when they had 36 in stock and it came Saturday morning (free delivery). Now on the website it says that they have 7 overdue.
My advice: Wait for a few days until they come in stock. Novatech did have 9 overdue last week but they were quick to replenish. It is way worth it to get a 45nm CPU over the older generation 65nm ones, price and performance-wise.
...or you could do what I did: 1) get an e2180 for ~$80; 2) OC to 3.2 GHz (which according to a big Tom's article makes it functionally equivalent to a 6750 or even 6850); 3) Keep it for a couple months until this 45 nm stuff settles out; then 4) eBay it/keep it as a spare.
If you are a gamer, you will not notice much of a difference (GPU is more important). The loss you will incur in selling the e2180 will be less than the amount of money the 8400 will drop once supplies ramp up. E.g., pay $230 now or pay $190 in a month or two.
Why wait any longer? Get that new system rolling--I know you want to!
Buy the Q6600 it is better the E8400 anyhow. You can play EVERY game and only be bottlenecked by the GPU.
Plus with the quad (that you cant do with E8400) you can listen to music, brows the internet looking at some girlies and read your emails while playing your games.
Yea the CPU these days is not a bottleneck. Its the GPU really. Husky McTa rFlash is right. And by then you could even get a nice Q9450/9550/9300 instead. I would personally go with the Q9450 since it has a higher sock clock(2.66GHz) but either way the 4nm chips run very cool even compared to their 65nm counterparts.
Buy the Q6600 it is better the E8400 anyhow. You can play EVERY game and only be bottlenecked by the GPU.
Plus with the quad (that you cant do with E8400) you can listen to music, brows the internet looking at some girlies and read your emails while playing your games.
WTF? CPU speed is still important in a lot of games, I hate it when people make such generalisations. Btw, you can still Alt+Tab out of a game with a dual core and do other stuff, I do that all the time, you just need enough RAM to keep the game running in the background whilst you're on the desktop, CPU cores has nothing to do with it.
WTF? CPU speed is still important in a lot of games, I hate it when people make such generalisations. Btw, you can still Alt+Tab out of a game with a dual core and do other stuff, I do that all the time, you just need enough RAM to keep the game running in the background whilst you're on the desktop, CPU cores has nothing to do with it.
This is not all true. Yes for gaming CPU speed will boost the lower end of the FPS especially higher clocked CPUs but more cores will allow you to do more. I get bored and try to bog my Q6600 down and it has yet to.
My only advice is depending on 2 things. Do you want to spend $200-$250 now and have to upgrade once more games become multi-threaded or spend $200-$250 now and have your rig futureproofed? Thats what you have to ask since a Q6600 will be better in the loooooongggg run where as a E8400 will be better now and for a while.
Of course it may take a few year for games to be multi-threaded optimized but we are seeing them now and more will start coming this year.
This is not all true. Yes for gaming CPU speed will boost the lower end of the FPS especially higher clocked CPUs but more cores will allow you to do more. I get bored and try to bog my Q6600 down and it has yet to.
FWIW, I'm Alt+Tab'ed out of a game (FIFA 08) as I type this post. I've got around 10 Firefox tabs open, I'm downloading a file, I've got Utorrent running in the background, I've got antivirus and anti-malware software running. To be honest, my biggest 'bottleneck' is my 1Mbps Internet connection which is 'bogged down' by all the background downloads.
Quote :
My only advice is depending on 2 things. Do you want to spend $200-$250 now and have to upgrade once more games become multi-threaded or spend $200-$250 now and have your rig futureproofed? Thats what you have to ask since a Q6600 will be better in the loooooongggg run where as a E8400 will be better now and for a while.
Of course it may take a few year for games to be multi-threaded optimized but we are seeing them now and more will start coming this year.
Yes, lets wait 2 years for games to finally run faster on a Q6600 than an E8400. If you really want to keep your Q6600 for 3 - 4 years and hope to run games then, it's probably a better choice.
Even in a 'massively multithreaded' game like Supreme Commander, an E8400 outperforms a Q6600 by sheer clockspeed, which compensates for the lack of 2 physical cores. http://www23.tomshardware.com/cpu_ [...] &chart=421
A quad core is useful for many things, but gaming is not one of them, and won't be in the near future. In the long term, yes, but we are talking a matter of years, not months.
FWIW, I'm Alt+Tab'ed out of a game (FIFA 08) as I type this post. I've got around 10 Firefox tabs open, I'm downloading a file, I've got Utorrent running in the background, I've got antivirus and anti-malware software running. To be honest, my biggest 'bottleneck' is my 1Mbps Internet connection which is 'bogged down' by all the background downloads.
Quote :
My only advice is depending on 2 things. Do you want to spend $200-$250 now and have to upgrade once more games become multi-threaded or spend $200-$250 now and have your rig futureproofed? Thats what you have to ask since a Q6600 will be better in the loooooongggg run where as a E8400 will be better now and for a while.
Of course it may take a few year for games to be multi-threaded optimized but we are seeing them now and more will start coming this year.
Yes, lets wait 2 years for games to finally run faster on a Q6600 than an E8400. If you really want to keep your Q6600 for 3 - 4 years and hope to run games then, it's probably a better choice.
Even in a 'massively multithreaded' game like Supreme Commander, an E8400 outperforms a Q6600 by sheer clockspeed, which compensates for the lack of 2 physical cores. http://www23.tomshardware.com/cpu_ [...] &chart=421
A quad core is useful for many things, but gaming is not one of them, and won't be in the near future. In the long term, yes, but we are talking a matter of years, not months.
Apparently you can O/C the 6600 to get up to at 3ghz on Air. Food for thought. Which is more important, cores or clock speed? And how do you compare clockspeed of different models? IE, p4 vs Core Duo vs Quad, etc.
Apparently you can O/C the 6600 to get up to at 3ghz on Air. Food for thought. Which is more important, cores or clock speed? And how do you compare clockspeed of different models? IE, p4 vs Core Duo vs Quad, etc.
Yes, the Q6600 can be overclocked very high, 3GHz is a no brainer, in fact 3.6GHz should be possible with a good HSF. However, the E8400 can often be overclocked to 4GHz+ as well. Right now, the vast majority of games run best on a higher clocked dual core, as opposed to a lower clocked quad core.
As for P4 vs Core 2, they are leagues apart in terms of performance. P4 does about 1/2 the work per clock, so a 3GHz C2D is equal to about a hypothetical 6GHz P4.
When the 45nm quads start shipping, I suspect that the Q6600 owners will become unhappy and dump them. The new quads will be faster, clock for clock , run cooler, overclock higher, and cost less. They were supposed to be here by now. That said, any of the good cpu's like Q66/6700, E84/8500, E68/6750 will be about as good as it gets for gaming, assuming you have a good vga card. There is no futureproofing here, in a year or so, any of these options will not be as good as the same priced nehalem. In the coming year, I do not see any major increase in quad core games. Those games like flight simulator X know they are cpu bound, and have already taken steps to use more cores. It is not a trivial thing to produce multithreaded applications... What incentive to game producers have to do this if they don't need it? Better graphics performance is where they are developing code.
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E8400-stock, GA-P35-DS3R(rev2.1), Corsair 4x2gb 6400C5, EVGA 8800GTS-512-G92, Vista home premium-64-bit, WD velociraptor-300gb, PC P&C silencer-610, Antec SOLO, 2 x Samsung 275T, Samsung-203b-dvd
