gaming CPU

q9450

^ +1 (I think a E8400 will do..)
you might wanna check some Graphics Cards too!

300-400 buck CPU is the Q9450. many games wont take advantage of all 4 cores right now but in the future they will. So you will be future proof for a long time and wont NEED to upgrade your cpu anytime soon

Actually, they do, even on non-quad-optimized games, due to supporting modules being shuffled to spare cores. The difference just isn't that big.

Unreal 3. Unreal engine is popular and used by many games.
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3127&p=4

i haven't seen reviews of Q9450 gaming performance ... or for that matter any decent reviews of Q9450...

Q9300 surely goes neck and neck with E8400 and E8500...all of which outperform Q6600.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/core2quad-...

Not sure if Q9450 would outperform Q9300 and E8500 .... i'd like it if someone posts valid benchmarks here.

Q9450 will certainly outperform q9300 at the same clock rate. Q9300 average 7% faster than q6600 at stock, and use 6mb instead of 8mb cache. The real problem with q9300 is its low multiplier, 7.5x, compared to q6600's 9x and q6700's 10x. It's very hard to oc q9300 to the same speed of others due to this reason. On some motherboards, it's impossible. Might as well jump to q9450 for an upgrade, and skip q9300.

^... yes agreed regarding the multiplier but where are the reviews lady? ..lol..

We KNOW that the Q9450 would outperform the Q9300...but i'd like to see some reviews ... its funny that it hasn't been benchmarked yet.

E8400 is better unless you overclock the Q9450 as the lower clock speed will bottleneck the GPU in games that are not quad core optimized. Future-proofing does not matter because as soon as nehalem comes out, ALL CPU's currently on the market will become outdated.

must...have...benchies...

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/core2quad-...

No Q9450, but im SURE you know that the Q9450 is the same chip as the Q9300 just with +.5 multi. A Q9450 isn't going to to be running at 4.0ghz on air. 3.6ghz is reasonable. As we can see, the E8400 beats out the Q9300 evreytime by a a reasonable margin. 100mhz on the same chip will not have any effect on the standings.

Edit: In games that is. Benchmarks don't matter if they don't translate into game performance.

^...thanx for the link... btw thats the same link i posted in the other thread you and i were posting in. sheesh.

Haha yes, I know, kinda ironic huh. You also posted it in this thread, scroll up a bit  .

Edit: I think you got the threads mixed up a bit, the link is only in this thread.

i posted the same link in 2 threads. achtung, mate.

anyhow to get back to the topic... OP ... what are the rest of the hardware specs ..

Whatever, I'm too confused. I don't think the original poster is online right now. But based on his budget for the CPU, i would guess total budget is around 1700 USD.