E8400 vs Q9300

[lee-gamer]

Well I want to upgrade my current CPU the Pentium D 945 3.4 GHz
I want an affordable quad core the C2Q Q9300 is a deal for me.
But in reviews the E8400 always come first specially for gaming.
So which is better the Q9300 or the E8400.
Both has the same cache memory, 6MB

A quad core will be better for me but the Q9300 has its cache memory halved.

So which one will I choose so do I have to wait that Nethalem comes out so that prices of the Q9450/Q9550 go down?

I can play all my games up to now but it seemed that the CPU is bottlenecking my 4870 and RAM.
I'm starting to save some money for that.
I also have to buy a CPU cooling as wanna overclock to a 400MHz FSB.

 

[dagger]

Whither to wait is up to you.

As for the choices now, consider a q6600 instead of q9300 for quad core. At stock, q9300@2.5ghz outperforms q6600@2.4ghz by an average 7%, less in games, more in new encoding software that take advantage of SSE4 instructions, which q6600 does not have. q9300 suffers from less cache in larger and more complex programs such as games, and overclocks horribly due to low 7.5x multiplier (compared to 9x for q6600 and 10x for g6700). A q6600 easily overclock to 3.6ghz, at which point it outperforms $1000+ "extreme" quad cpus at stock. The $180 price is also cheap for an Intel quad:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115018

As for dual vs quad, a lower clocked quad will outperform higher clocked dual even in old non-quad optimized games, as long as the clock gap isn't too big. Dual is only faster if its clock is significantly higher.
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/core2quad-q6600_8.html

 

[venkat karthik]

many games even crysis do not take the advantage of multicores hence we have no gain in performance of crysis by using a pentium d and a pentium 4 at same clock speed

this is the same case with core 2 duo or a core 2 quad

crysis utilizes only 100*(1/ number of cores) percentage of cpu

considering future games support for multicore(considering all cores utilized to their extreme performance) any core 2 quad can easily defeat even core 2 extreme dual core

pentium d is going to very have a large gain over pentium 4( frame rates over pentium 4 clocked at same rate will be about 60% more )
but pentiums are really old to prove themselfs before powerful core2

 

[dagger]

many games even crysis do not take the advantage of multicores hence we have no gain in performance of crysis by using a pentium d and a pentium 4 at same clock speed

this is the same case with core 2 duo or a core 2 quad

crysis utilizes only 100*(1/ number of cores) percentage of cpu

considering future games support for multicore(considering all cores utilized to their extreme performance) any core 2 quad can easily defeat even core 2 extreme dual core

pentium d is going to very have a large gain over pentium 4( frame rates over pentium 4 clocked at same rate will be about 60% more )
but pentiums are really old to prove themselfs before powerful core2

That's wrong. Crysis use dual cores, just not 4.

 

[invisik]

ya crysis uses dual cores.
more cores better the other cores can run other junk while ur gaming.
=]

 

[spuddyt]

ahhhhhh i'm blinded by the green type

 

[randomizer]

many games even crysis do not take the advantage of multicores hence we have no gain in performance of crysis by using a pentium d and a pentium 4 at same clock speed

That is absolute BS, Crysis runs infinitely faster on a dual core, although PDs are probably too slow to see as great a difference.

crysis utilizes only 100*(1/ number of cores) percentage of cpu

Which happens to be 50-60% of both cores instead of topping out one core and killing your performance.

 

[lee-gamer]

I can easily play Crysis with my Pentium D at high specs but my sound vanished on Vista.
That's why I wanna upgrade to a C2D or C2Q but it seemed that I have to increase the number of cores to 4.
A quad will be much better for the future.
Well the Q66oo is indeed a very good CPU but its outdated now has to move to the new 45nm generation.
Maybe the Q9300 is not as much good as the Q6600 in terms or overclocking but I have to go for that.
Or I just has to be more patient and have the Q9450 but it seemed to be out of stock at the moment. I searched on Ebay.
Well so this the Q9550 on top.
Well with a price of $340 its a bit expensive for me and I'll pay lots of taxes when I get it here.
Have also to pay $50 as S&H.

 

[Wisecracker]

Unless you have software capable of running 4 parallel threads across those cores e8400 > q9300 both in price and performance.

Multitasking/background processes are handled primarily in RAM. When you moved to Vista, 64-bit was the way to go with 4gb to 6gb of RAM.

Buying a quad 'now' for the 'future' is not advisable (as noted above). Future quads will be faster, cheaper and have infinitely better instruction sets - and, maybe, just maybe, software will be able to use thoise cores.

 

[lee-gamer]

So you are suggesting me to buy a E8400 instead of the Q9000 series.
But will Intel continues to produce LGA 775 processors as it is moving to a new socket and to Nethalem.
Also there is no great difference in the price of 45nm and 65nm processors.
The main difference is the FSB.
I doubt that new processors will be cheaper since they will be much better.

Well gotta wait an see.