Did I make a mistake ordering a e8400?

I ordered a E8400 for a mATX setup I'm building, and now notice the Q6600 is basicly the same price. Should I have gone with the q6600 and just clocked it at 3Ghz?

I was not planning on overclocking at first, but it seems to me 3ghz x4 would multitask a bit better than 3Ghz x 2

My original theory was to get the Duo core now, and upgrade in a year or so to a higher clock Quad when the prices come down.

Hi good people,

in my opinion , OS still don't require this 4 cores processor ,
but there are some Engineering like IVUS that require 4 cores .
if you are dealing with some programs like this , you should get the quad.
if you don't and you use your pc for games, I think dual is just fine .
you can overclock it and it would work great .

by the way in Hebrew there is a phrase that when someone is starting to grow up later than all the people , he will grow more than the other people,
so I say wait a year, you will get something much better I believe.

but still its really depends on what your planning to do with this machine.

Best regards,
Noam .

The quad might help with the video work depending on the software you use...

If you're building a mATX system, I assume it's in a SFF case? If so, the cooler unOCd 8400 would definitely be the better choice.

You don't need a quad core.

Heh...

You really can't go wrong with either.

And if your running Vista64 bit, I'd highly recommend a 4 core CPU.

Vista64 bit will make use of all 4 cores better then XP.

I'll prob just run Vista Ultimate (32bit) or XP Pro 32bit.....I got a copy of a bunch of x64 installs I wanted to try (XP & 2k3) just have not bothered yet....

Can I borrow your CC?

It prob costs more than my entire build +500$ or so.....

Sounds good to me

I think I will be happy enough for a few days at stock clock....coming from a P4 2.8Ghz....

I build atleast one setup like yours every week. Sometimes more. I always slap the mobo on the table with cpu, HS, ram, and turn it on to bios. From there i change the FSB to 400 and ram to 800 then i drop the multi down to 8. Restart and its running 3.2, check temps in Bios to make sure all is well. Then I insatall windows, realtemp, CPU-Z, Prime95 and do some testing. When all is well i bump the multi back to 9, and sometimes bump the FSB and Ram higher if I am using ram that can go higher the 800.

The 8800GT will fit and with room to spare. the case is almost identicle to the ones I use.

If you even think you might paint it, do it now!

I'd go with some UV paint if your gonna do a window.
The bad thing about a window in that case is wire management is difficult in such a case.

My case and monitor showed up today. I did relieve how big a 22" widescreen was. Waiting for my wife's reaction still as she has not seen it yet.

for 25$, the case is excellent. I decided not to paint, as I just can cut out a window over the mATX board only, thus hiding everything else (drive cage, PSU, etc) This thing will work just fine, and have excellent flow.

Stick with the E8400.

Yes, the Q6600 can improve video encoding speed a little bit if you use the right program and codec. The E8400 has SSE4 the Q6600 doesn't, plus the E8400 clock is higher than the Q6600. Finally, it will dissipate less heat. That's important in a mATX case.

SSE4 are basically multimedia extension that codecs can take advantage of to decrease encoding times; in other words process more frames per second.

Keep the E8400. Period.