Processor Help! Please!

Probably depends.

Faster at what?

Games?
Encoding?

The big thing here is going to be whether you're using multi-threaded software that can take advantage of multiple cores or not.

The Q8200, which happens to be the processor I have in my home machine, will probably be a little slow in single threaded tasks because of its lower clock speed.


If you want to play modern games and encode video, I would go with the Q8200.

They're about the same price, so you pretty much have a choice between 2 really fast cores, and 4 slightly slower cores that will rock in multi-threaded apps (you'd need 3 or 4 threads for it to out-shine the E8400).

LGA 775 is EOL. So you may want to look into a good compromise, the AMD Phenom II X3 720:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] -_-Product

It's signifcantly cheaper, but still really fast and comparable with the E8400 and Q8200.

You may also want to look at:

Phenom II X4 810 - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] -_-Product

and

Phenom II X4 940BE - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] -_-Product


I have a hard time recommending any LGA 775 parts for a new build, as the socket is EOL.

If you go Intel and can afforad a little bit more the i5 750 is nice, and it's even dropped to the $200 mark now.