Stuck Between two CPU's...and a game?!

here goes another Q6600 vs E8400 post, but this time, with a twist?

E8400 offers future proof gaming and i guess will last me a good long time, but, as i have read in a topic somewhere, supreme commander (a game) works better on quads than duals, thats where im stuck, i have supreme commander and guess what? i wanna play it =P any suggestions on what i sould do?

the graphics card is going to matter more than q6600 vs e8400 imo

i'd get the 6600 because of the huge improvements in video editing and 3d rendering, but for straight gaming either is good

dont they have the same stocks lol? and yea i heard the E8400 can OC like a"bejesus" im guessing 2 things

1. less cores, less heat?

2. is it more stable?

oh right forgot to ask my stupid question, what the hell is FSB on CPUs and MBs?

by the time duals get outdates itl be like in 2 years, by that time my whole comuter will be outdated anyway, same with the Q6600, itl prolly be the slowest CPU on the market in 2 years, the way technology is advancing....

eh, i wouldnt be suprised to see games coming out this christmas or around there that will start utilizing multiple cores, it might be a little sooner then everyone thinks, also yes supreme commander has been optimized to multithreading, and ive read that quite a few people seen a huge diffrence going from a dual core to a quad, i choose the quad because a. its more horse power for the money, even a oc'd e8400 can only net you around 8.8 gigs total horse power, and b. multithreading is starting to come online, sure im going to have to upgrade in 2 years or so to have something competitive on the gaming side of things, but by then the dual cores will be having there issues with both cores being used in most things, also i still havent seen anyone with a dual core, that can show me anything besides benchmarks, that a higher clock brings about better game play vs quad with a mild oc.

The OP is getting ready to drop up to $2K. For some that's significant $$. I'm sure the OP will do more on this new rig than play games. Is an OC'd E8400 going to give him 20+ fps more than an OC'd Q6600? I doubt it. ...but I could be wrong. Perhaps the OP may experiment with video editing or virtualization. Perhaps the OP will experiment with virtualization while gaming. ...or running a viruscan/spyware scan while gaming. Cases in which case a quad would, how do they put it..."wipe the floor" with a dual-core. I tested this 2 days ago just for the fun of it. I took out my Q9450 and put back in my E6850 and OC'd it to 3.7Ghz. Fired up Lost Planet and tried to do my standard virtualizations...XP and Ubunto simultaneously. My rig simply rebooted. It didn't cry, beep, or sneeze, it just rebooted. Fair enough. Tried again, ...BSOD. Last night I put my Q9450 back in and mildly OC'd it to 3.4Ghz and ran the same test. I tell you I was able to play Lost Planet @ 1600x1200 (@ 19-21fps) while I had Ubunto and XP VMWare virtual machines running in Vista 64. So, I'm sorry, but I'm sold. I may sound arrogant, forgive me if I do, but for ~same money I just can't see buying a dual-core when an OEM Q6600 can be had at MicroCenter for $180US.

So I stand on, "It's 2008, not 2005...get a Quad". No need to stress that this is my opinion any more than I need to say the Earth orbits the Sun.

Yeah, but what else you are capable of doing while gaming is a function of CPU, not of GPU.

does the earth really revolve the sun? or is it our imagination wooohohohohohohoohohohohoh

no-one answered my stupid question "what is FSB"?

lmao i meant what it does XD

Crysis plays better with a quad too.

and if i do? lol

higher FSB typically means higher performance. Not that this matters, but if you want to imrove Vista's Windows Experience Index scores one of the known ways to do that is to increase your computer's FSB. Another way to do that is to buy a ....


...Quad.

fight, fight, fight!

The problem with that example is Lost Planet is one of the few games
that use all 4 cores in a quad. So it's natural for a quad to wipe the
floor with a dual. Supreme Commander is another one, although it didn't
scale quite as well.

Right now, a faster dual can outperform a quad on typical games today.

Judging from the time between when dual first came out and dual
optimization becomes norm for games, compared to when quad first came
out, dual should still have 2 more years of useful lifespan for gaming.

Once dual optimization rolled out, the performance gap became so huge
older single cores that used to be on top due to exact the same reason
cited for duals now quickly became useless. The quad vs dual contest
now is exactly the same as single vs dual a few years back. Today, a
two years old dual is still usable for gaming, while a two years old
single core is completely worthless for the same purpose.

So basically, within 2 years, dual will give you better performance.
For 2+ years, there is no option other than quad. Dual just won't cut
it once quad optimization becomes the norm. Although quad will give you
fine performance within 2 years as well.

Dagger, wise one, I'm not arguing that a quad makes a game run faster than a dual does. I'm not arguing that at all. My point is that a quad allows you to do more while gaming than a dual does. My own tests (which no one cares about but me, I know) prove this...for me.

Its people's $$, and I know many people don't virtualize and game while doing other tasks in the background so its smarter for them to get a dual-core for better gaming. I was never trying to state anything else. My grammar may be bad and I may have miscommunicated. I apologize.

...besides the Q6600's don't have the stuck DTS issues that cause inaccurate temp readings that the C1 stepping 45nm Wolfiies and Yorkies have. ...but the 6600's also don't have 2 x 6MB L2 Cache (do it make a difference?)

Heres a question to the dual core folks, who also have ran a quad, they claim a performance diffrence in games, how big of a diffrence? I really have never seen anyone specify this in any posts, so lets get some remarks here.

Small, and not noticable in games right now, as they're gpu bottlenecked, not cpu bottlenecked.

The performance gain of quad over dual on quad optimized programs are far larger.

Some feel that they're the same and you just pay more for the X48.

If you're not planning on extreme overclocks remember you can likely do better than 1600 FSB on an X38. I'm @ 1700 FSB and think it could push harder when my Reapers arrive on Monday.

Agreed. But can't you just end the random resource hogging programs (ie BitTorrent (which also effects internet bandwidth) at least during gaming?

Go Quad!