E8600 now or Q9650 now and for future??

I live out in New Zealand where computer hardware is expensive. I'm not sure of the exchange rate, but the NZ price for the Q9650 is double the price of the E8600.

Not only that but the E8600 over here is 140% of the price of the E8500 which should give similar performance when OC'd. Also, over here the 8500 is about $10 more expensive than the 8400, so there's no reason not to get the better chip.

My advice is if you're on a tight budget, get the E8500. Very cheap dual core that will last a few years if you're lucky.

If you simply must have a quad, I'd pick the Q9550. Again, the NZ price of the 9550 is just over half that of the 9650. All the benchmark tests I've studied show that the 9650 is barely faster than the cheaper 9550.

And finally if money is no objectt, go for Core i7 and upgrade every few days months as new hardware is released.

If your component prices are wildly different wherever you hail from, then please disregard this whole reply.

At the level of the E8500 or Q9450, the vga card is much more important for gaming than the cpu.
At that level, overclocking is good for bragging, but it will not net you as much increase
in FPS as a better vga card will. Today, very few games can make use of more than two cores.
Flight simulator X and supreme commander are exceptions. It is not a trivial matter to code multi threaded programs,
and game vendors will not sell too many games that require quads to run.
I don't see this changing in the next couple of years.

Net: E8500 for the increased clock speed.

If you want a quad anyway, wait to see what nehalem offers. The entry 2.66 cpu will cost $284 in 1000 unit trays. It will run faster, clock for clock than the current core2 cpus, but nobody can tell you exactly by how much. It has hyperthreading which gives the appearance of 8 cores.

Far Cry 2 uses 4 cores and a lot more new games will.I'd go for the quad.

Yeah, I guess my reply was a bit confusing... Sorry about that.

I was saying to get the q9550 instead of the q9650. You save $220 and it can overclock almost as far as the q9650.