I am in the process of building a new system. The main use will be for gaming but i will do some some light/medium video editing on it (home movies and such). I was planning on OCing whichever CPU i bought. So should i go with the e8400 as originally planned or change to q9450? Will the 8400 be able to handle the video side of it in a reasonable manner or will it struggle. How is the 9450 with gaming? Thanks for all the help.
Here is the rest setup i have planned
?????Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 Wolfdale?????
Visiontek Radeon HD 4870
Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD2500AAKS 250GB
SAMSUNG 22X DVD
OCZ Reaper HPC Edition 4GB (2 x 2GB)
COOLER MASTER RC-690
CORSAIR CMPSU-550VX
XIGMATEK HDT-S1283 w/ Retention bracket
Both are great CPUs but it really depends on how often you upgrade.
If you upgrade every 6 or 12 months then the E8400 would probably be the better buy. If you want the system to last for a few years I would recommend the Q9450. Both CPUs will overclock past 3Ghz and will give you plenty of performance.
Go with the E8400 or even better a Q6600 over the Q9450. The Guru3d article measures everything at stock speeds. Look at the FPS. Notice even at stock speeds in many games they are already faster than the the human eye perceive a difference. You won't notice any real world difference in games between any of them once over they are clocked to 3.2-3.4ghz. So $wise it would seem that if you wanted a quad, why spend more on a end of life platform unless you need the SSE4.
Message edited by Craxbax on 07-11-2008 at 07:34:06 PM
I'd like to get a couple of years use out of this setup if possible. I'm not sure about which program i'm going to use just yet. I have Final Cut Pro on my PPC G5 Mac but since it isn't the newer intel chipset it won't handle the HD video my camcorder can produce.
Since you want the system to last, I would definitely go with the Q9450. You will get the same speed as a dual core, and as programs become more multithreaded, you system will get faster instead of slower.
If not the Q9450 then maybe the cheaper Q6600, which will also overclock to >3.2Ghz
There will be very little difference in gaming performance between an E8400 and Q9450, but the Q9450 would dominate the E8400 in video editing (provided the software takes advantage of quad cores).
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