Hello, I'm wondering which of these processors would be better for gaming and video editing, thanks.

Intel® Core™2 Q6600 Quad-Core (8MB L2 cache,2.4GHz,1066FSB)
or

Intel® Core™ 2 Duo Processor E8400 (6MB L2 Cache,3.0GHz,1333FSB)

which is better a car with 2 engines running at @ 2400bhp?

or a car with 4 engines running @ 3000bhp?

use common sense

there mi1ez

???

The e8400 will be better for gaming, the Q6600 for video encoding.

Your best bet is to go for the quad and OC it to the speed of the 8400 or faster depending on cooling and mobo.

liljone, you beat me to the correction!

i hit post in the middle of tyeing by mistake.

lol

you still got it wrong!

you meant 4 @ 2400bhp and 2 @ 3000bhp!

Not a great analogy though...

or maybe use common SENSE. LOL

It really is dependant on what you plan to do with your PC, as I am using an AMD Athlon X2 6000+ which is Dual Core, I do alot of video encoding & editing, and do a fair bit of gaming, Im not planning on making the move up to Quad until Quad has been updated and proven to be Much Faster than Dual Core.

So i would say the Dual Core.

This is an age old question and I went thru this a few months ago. For me, it seemed better to go with the Quad and Im glad I did. I have gotten into donating my pcs spare time to science thru folding at home and they have a basic program that is for a standard system (single & dual cores) and another program for high end muiti core systems (quads). I have 3 dual core systems and 1 quad. I also have 5 other pcs on my team from different locations that were running for three days before I set up my quad. My quad is steadily scoring points that equals all of the other systems combined based on the workload I am able to turn in. This is partly due to a program limitation for the standard systems. My Quad is allowed to run 100% all of the time and it automatically ramps down on its own when I want to do things such as play games. The standard program runs dual cores around 40-60% and ramps down when you need it to.

For gaming, you can overclock the E8400 a little more and get a little more gaming performance over the Q6600. But I feel this will change when more games are coded to take advantage of more than two cores. This is already happening in some games now and will be more available from this point forward.

You will be happy either way at this point but as I said, for myself I wanted to have more cores for when they can be utilized. I am thinking about upgrading my media center pc to a quad from a dual core to drastically increase my scoring on the folding@home project.

The decision is really yours to make based on do you want higher performance now or later? They will both do what you want now, no problem.

I would have to recommend the quad core due to video editing. Im not sure what program you use but even if it doesnt take advantage of multiple cores, you will still get better performance when you are multitasking with a quad, IMO.

haha i know, i try ed to explain it best way with out writing 2 pages in detail on it.

Agree with you england, except I believe it will be a while before games actually use more than 2 cores. When that happens, we'll probably be buying Nehalem's anyway (and a whole new system to go with it).

There are already plenty of games that take advantage of the quad core according to this thread. Not sure how accurate the information is though, you will have to read the thread.

http://www.halflife2.net/forums/sh [...] p?t=130262

Yes, it depends on what your doing with it. Both are excellent processors for right type of application, and if you are going to overclock or run at stock speeds.
A quad core won't "future proof" any better than a Core 2 Duo. By the time their are enough programs out that a quad is mandatory, the current quads will ancient dinosours and people who have quads will be upgrading them again as well.

With decent to good cooling, you can push a Q6600 to 3.3 - 3.6 GHz.

There's one other factor to consider. Motherboards with nVidia 680i chipsets do not seem to like C2Q CPU's.

find the benchmarks, Duo for gaming is better bang for buck, and often just plain faster, just google for game benchmarks and duo and quad if you don't believe me.

Personally I'd go for the Quad for two reasons:

1: Video editing software will make use of the 4 cores
and
2: When games DO utilise multiple cores you have 2 extra cores available to you without spending a penny.

If you're serious about gaming then a ****-hot GPU is going to more than make up for any MHz "deficit" a Quad core may have.

When you post, it tells you to use search first. Your question aint no different from the other 100 exactly the same questions.

Buy what you want. The dual and quad will be the roughly the same at the same speeds. The quad will win on multi threaded apps.

hmmm, what do you mean much faster than a dual core? compared to an X2 6000+, the C2D's and CQD's already are much faster at the same speed.

Quad cores clock to the same speed as dual core 90% of the time. In that case they are equal until you use multi threaded apps.

thats why u liquid nitrogen cool your quads, so they can hit the same speed as the e8400. moo ha ha. jes a personal preference, i rather use a quad than a dual core though, i also got a dual core computer sitting around...to me, the quad seems much faster all around in applications/windows...etc.
IMO, i don't think gaming on a quad or c2d will matter much once ur above the 3.0+ range but i could be wrong

Isn't this the same thread, day after day?