Q6600 or E8500

It depends on what the PC is being used for.

If gaming the higher clock speeds have a slight advantage.
For anything else the Quad is superior eg decoding, photoshopping, running lots of apps at once. The Quad will also offer more in the way of future proofing as new apps utilise more cores. In order to fully realise the power however you would need Vista 64 as it supports multicores much better.

If you intend to overclock, the Q6600 will reach 3.0GHz with ease, and many here reach 3.3-3.6GHz.

Its a good hobby to take up btw

64 bit has nothing to do with the number of cores, pr2thej is incorrect.

The future is in many/multi-cores systems. If you have the money for a q6600, it would be a big mistake to go dual core(ie. E8500).

Thanks guys

Just went to newegg and ordered the Q6600. It was a whole 3 dollars more than the 8500.

So now for the graphics card.

Whats your GPU budget? If you want to slay everything then the Nvidia 295 / 285 are out imminently, supposedly the 295 tops the Radeon 4870 marginally.
Best bang for buck is still Radeon 4850 imo, and would compliment your CPU well.

I narrowed things down to these same two choices last aug. I am happy with my Q6600 oc'd at 3.0. A lot of apps may not be optimized for quad yet but in a year or two the upgrade I will have to consider is Q6600 vs. Q9550. And chances are it won't be worth spending any $$ on an upgrade since I did not buy the E8500.

q6600 for future proofing.
i have my q6600 at 3.4ghz
i went to 3.6 and my motherboard died (being rma'd 3year warranty baby!)
its good to

hehe slow down he only just became a computer geek