Budget Gaming Machine E5200 Vs. E7300 Vs. E8400

Like the title says i have decided on intel dual core now i have it narrowed down to 3 processors

any opinions?

all 3 have great reviews from NEwegg.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6819115037

there is the comparison charts.

what is gonna give me my best bang for my buck I was trying to stay between 100-125 but Let me know what ya'll think and what would be a good mother board to pair with that...

I see th E5200 was used on this months budget build and then OC'ed a ton(is that a good idea?) i was under the impression OCing kills chips...

Tom

I guess some of this will depend on what the rest of your system looks like, and what you intend to do with this system. Are you into PC Gaming?

Obviously the e8400 is the best chip of those three. That sucker is an absolute machine for gaming purposes, and OC's very well from what I've seen on these forums. The benefits of this chip would be the higher FSB (1333) and the 6MB cache. For gaming situations those would both come in handy. Problem here is, this thing is over the budget you set.

With a stock speed of 3Ghz the e8400 doesn't need much of an Overclock to allow modern video cards to perform at their peak. Games like Crysis really start to shine performance wise with a CPU of 3Ghz or faster.

That e7300 is a good chip too. Seems like I had read about really good results with the e7200 and it OC'ing really well. With a FSB of 1066 and a 3MB cache, it'll outperform the e5200. This is also at the top end of your budget of $100-$125.

The e5200 has 2MB of cache (which really isn't a lot by today's standards) and an 800Mhz FSB. It's probably a very good chip, but for gaming purposes it's probably not the best choice possible. But it's also under your budget, which might allow you to add a couple extra dollars spent elsewhere (video card) if you were upgrading anything else.

The C2D's overclok very well and so long as you dont use too much voltage they wont die .

For a budget the e7300 is the choice . Manually setting fsb to 333 will get the processor to 3.33 Ghz. At that it will out perform an e8400 at stock speed . Its as simple as that [ though follow the overclocking guides on this site ]

If you use an aftermarket cooler many people have run e7300's at close to 4 GHz, but unless you already own the cpu cooler it might be cheaper to buy an e8400 in the forst place .

The motherboard sweet spot is pretty much intel p45 based boards . I like ASUS and GIGABYTE but others are ok too .

The E5200 is a good value but it seems to max out around 3.0GHz as far as an overclock goes. While the E8400 is the fastest and the best overclocker of the three, I say go with the E7300 so you can put more money towards a better motherboard or video card. No matter what CPU you go with your system will be limited by that x1650 as far as gaming goes.

I would say pick a $$ limit and build a new system. That X1650 needs to go.

Hell I would be willing to bet that you could put in a 9600GT or a 3850 in your current system and it would give you a bigger boost than putting in a new CPU with the current GPU. But I would say you need a new system.

If you don't have a lot of cash go for the E5200 and a nice MB that will OC it at least to 3Ghz then invest most of you $$ into a good video card like a 4850.

How much of a budget do you have? I know that WoW will take advantage of dual core cpu's but not sure about quad though.

Give us a budget. Tell us what you can reuse.

if i have to wait a few weeks and bump up to 600 or 625 (including vista home prem) i souppose i could wait.

You could always try keeping your current system and upgrading the video card. The worst case scenario then is that you're not satisfied with the performance and you can carry over the new video card to a new system.

Also, I wouldn't recommend upgrading your current system to Vista, as Vista doesn't run so great on single-core CPUs. I have an almost identical system to you; I recently upgraded to 2GB RAM and the 2600XT from an X600 and 1GB RAM, and I'm pretty happy with the performance. I don't play WoW, though, so I can't say anything there.

If you have an XP license, you could put the $100 that you save into your new system; you can build a pretty nice system for ~$600. That way, you get to keep your current system intact and use it as a second computer... You could always acquire Windows through other means, though...

maybe i will just build toms 625$ system and add vista home premium too it.

Yep, the E5x00 series are very good overclockers.

I have my E5300 OCed to 3.6GHz (1GHz OC) with 1.31v and with cheap $12 air cooler, it doesn't go above 57'C in Prime95.

Get quad core Q8400 instead. It costs merely $2 more than E8400.