Good cpu upgrade?

The E8500 would be substantially faster.... Does your motherboard support it though ? Make sure you research it before trying to upgrade.

Make sure your motherboard supports the new chip first! (pre P35 chipset based motherboards won't support E8400). Or consider OCing the E6600.

E8500 is not substantially faster. It's not enough of a gap to justify spending $200 on it. You should consider ocing that e6600 first. It goes easily to 3.6ghz, at which point it outperforms a stock e8500 by a large margin. You save $200. Otherwise get a quad core to make it a real upgrade. The future is multithreaded. A dual (2 cores, 2 threads) won't stand a chance against early model Nehalem with ht (4 cores, 8 threads), or later model Nehalem (8 cores, 16 threads) regardless of clock rate.

Hmm.. Maybe I will just hold off then. I only wanted to spend about 200 and I am sure a good quad core would run me more than that. I have never overclocked before but I will do some reserch on it.
Thanks for all the advice  

Well, q6600 is only $180. Here's gaming performance compared to faster clocked dual. 2 of the 5 games are quad optimized, 3 are not.
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/core2quad-...

3d rendering:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/core2quad-...

Whats your mobo model? That will determine what CPU you can upgrade to if you decide to.

If it is a decent model/brand you should be able to upgrade to any of the new ones. Thats if its a good maker who updates the BIOS for support.

I was also going to upgrade my motherbord to this...
https://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?Produc...

Oh and also I have a little more to spend on a cpu,so we are at around 280.00. Not sure if that gives me better options for a quadcore.Once again thanks for all your help  

There are cheaper p45 boards that perform just as well.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=E...

Intel quad lineup as follows:
Q6600 $180
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...
Q6700 $270
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...
Q9400 $275
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...
Q9450 $320
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...
Q9550 $329
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

There are also q9300 and q8200, but they suffer from low cache(4mb, 6mb, compared to 8 and 12mb), low multiplier(7x, 7.5x, compared to 9 and 10x), and is heavily oc bottlenecked. Bottom line performance is far below the cheaper q6600 while costing more.

Great, thanks dagger. Thinking of getting the q9400.  

Keep in mind 9400 has 6mb (2x3mb) cache, same as q9300, compared to q9450's 12mb(2x6mb). That's why there's the price gap even though everything else is the same. It's not ideal.