Phenom 9750 or AMD Athlon 64 X2 6400+ for gaming?

Well i found these two processors on New Egg and compared. The Phenom 9750 and the AMD Athlon 64 X2 6400+. Although many games are dual threaded it appears that quad threading shows the best results (Crisis is quad threaded), however, there are games that utilize dual core very well. The question is would you like it to be running games well now then fall behind later? Or would you rather buy a quad core and be safe for a little while until they are out dated and at the same time have a very powerful processor? Some games may show the best performance on the dual core but having 2 extra cores is not going to kill your performance rather it may just not be optimized as well (which is fine because you will still be able to run these games on maximum settings with a good graphics card). A prime example is Prototype (which is a terribly coded game. I like the game but it has more bugs than its worth) because it is a very processor heavy title with best results yielded on higher processors (and obviously higher graphics cards) due to its open world since there are more objects being processed.

Thanks for the reply. Right now i have a phenom 9550 so would the extra performance be even noticeable in games? Should I just wait for prices to drop and buy a new mobo and cpu? If the performance increase in games is big then i would rather go with the 9750 since installing a new mobo seems like a big task to me.

Try overclocking your CPU first.

If your planning on upgrading, you should get Phenom II rather than wasting your money by sticking with the old ones. If your mobo doesn't support it, do a cpu+mobo upgrade.

What is your current motherboard? There might be a bios update to support Ph II.

Agree completely. If your current board will accept a Phenom II, then go for one of those. You'll get a major boost in computing power for all-round tasks as well, not just gaming.

My motherboard is a Asus M2N78-LA / HP Viola-GL8E. I have no idea where i would be able to find a bios update for it.

no, it won't support phenom II cpu's, according to an other forum i found. you should try and mail HP about a new bios for it, as the socket and chipset should be able to support it!