E7200 vs E8400 vs Q6600

Planning on building a new pc pretty soon, but I am having trouble deciding what CPU to get. At first I was thinking an E7200. The E7200 only has 3mb cache though which makes me think the E8400 would be a better choice. At that price point though, would it make sense to go quad core? Seems to me that the E8400 would be faster

Whatever I get, I plan on throwing a big Zalman cooler on it and OC'in it quite a bit.

Just looking for some opinions, thanks for lookin.

well,,you could go with the 8400 for the time being,it's just that by the end of this year,,??,, and next year for sure,, there will be a lot more apps,capable of addressing quad cores ...:> )

Newegg has open box retail/ OEM Q6600s (SLACR) for $159/$149 respectively. Even if you can only get 3.2 -3.4 ghz from an OC you won't notice any real world performance advantage from an E8400 at 4ghz. A lot of E8400s struggle to get over 3.8ghz so I am seeing even less reason to go with a dual core at this point.

after building all three i would take the 3.6ghz q6600 over a 3.8 or 4ghz e8400

with intel pushing fsb the sweetspot is coming down and so is the overclocking. plus these new hafnium gate chips are not as durable or can take the voltage as well


q660o or a used qx9650 ($600) is my choice.

then again i run q6800 too

the qx9650 is a sweet ride at 4.2ghz of water coolness!

just so people know with vista changes the 4 cores are used