E8400 or E2160 or Q6600?

[JPreston]

I have an E8400 on back order with Scan, but they don't seem to want to send me one even when they have them in.

I'm split between buying an E8400 from somewhere else, or saving ~£90 by buying an E2160 and OC'ing it, or spending ~£20 extra and getting a Q6600 instead. Which pretty much spans Intel's range

The PC will be used for games, some movie encoding, as well as normal browsing and office stuff.

If you were building a S775 PC this week, what would you go for? Money isn't really tight but if I save ~£90 with an E2160 I can chuck it towards a GPU when I next upgrade that. I just want decent performance at a fair price

I'm a little hesitant to get a Q6600 as I think it might get borderline with my 460W Akasa PSU....though not sure how hot/power hungry an E2160 would get when OC'ed.

[staffsMike]

Most Pentium dual cores get to about 2.8GHz on stock volts, so probably won't use too much power, certainly not enough to cause problems.

If I were doing a build right now I would get the Q6600 if I could afford it. That will last bloomin ages and save you upgrading later.

If you are a frequent upgrader then get the pentium dual core, if you plan on it lasting a long long time get the q6600.

[JPreston]

Hhhhhmmm well since you mention it I could do with it lasting a long time, I tend not to upgrade my CPU/board all that frequently.

Will a Q6600 really last me a long time (say 2 years or more)? Won't the nehalem CPUs completely blow it away - they'll need a new board I think? Or, again thinking about nehalem, will S775 chips get much better than what is currently available or will they be finished later this year?

If S755 is expected to have a decent life yet then the E2160 with plans to upgrade in 12 - 18 months to something much better than a E8400/Q6600 could be a good idea. OTOH if S775 has pretty much peaked with the current ranges then I may as well get a Q6600 now, and this will be another one-shot disposable CPU/board upgrade, just like my last switch to S939 (damn you, AMD!!).

[matty-hodgson]

i'd go for the Q6600 if you want it to run and load games easily, without even breaking a sweat.

runs pretty cool at stock aswell with a decent heatsink and fan, around 35'C when it's warm outside..

if you get it on a cool day you get around 20'C on stock with a decent cooler and fan, like only a £15 1, not a huge quarter tonne heatsink.

[staffsMike]

If you are capable of ignoring the fact that the new cpu's will wipe the floor with yours then it will last a long long time.

In terms of actually struggling to perform I just don't see it having a problem for a good while yet. I build my pc's to either sell within 6 months to 18 months (to keep up with the times) or last me a long time and I'd be comfortable getting the Q6600.

[Blitzen]

I have an E8400 on back order with Scan, but they don't seem to want to send me one even when they have them in.

I'm split between buying an E8400 from somewhere else, or saving ~£90 by buying an E2160 and OC'ing it, or spending ~£20 extra and getting a Q6600 instead. Which pretty much spans Intel's range

The PC will be used for games, some movie encoding, as well as normal browsing and office stuff.

If you were building a S775 PC this week, what would you go for? Money isn't really tight but if I save ~£90 with an E2160 I can chuck it towards a GPU when I next upgrade that. I just want decent performance at a fair price

I'm a little hesitant to get a Q6600 as I think it might get borderline with my 460W Akasa PSU....though not sure how hot/power hungry an E2160 would get when OC'ed.

I have just been wrestling with this and in the end i went for the Q6600.
Pros vs the wolfdale:
- It will outlive the E8400 by some way i think.
- Its only £20 more
- More and more things will go the way of Quad in the coming months
- Its reliable unlike the wolfdales.
- Stupidly priced for a core that is barely better than an E6600

Cons:
-The ONLY one i can think of is the overclock potential but 3.8 vs 4.0ghz....is that really worth worry over?

I am glad i came to the decision i did.

[staffsMike]

With a good motherboard and RAM the E8400 would probably hit more like 4.5GHz from what I hear but the typical overclock will be as blitzen says as you need to get the RAM over 900MHz to get it further than 4.0GHz.

With the Q6600, as long as you don't expect more than 3.4GHz you can only be pleasently suprised if and when it hits 3.6 - 3.8GHz.

[Blitzen]

With a good motherboard and RAM the E8400 would probably hit more like 4.5GHz from what I hear but the typical overclock will be as blitzen says as you need to get the RAM over 900MHz to get it further than 4.0GHz.

With the Q6600, as long as you don't expect more than 3.4GHz you can only be pleasently suprised if and when it hits 3.6 - 3.8GHz.

I have just been looking at some benchmarks for these.
It read.

E8400 @ 4.2ghz
Q6600 @ 3.6ghz

Only 0.3% difference in fps in game(flip flopping winners btw).

The Q6600 seems to be the best buy thats all. Its no slower in real use than the E8400 and will have a longer life being quad rather than dual.

[staffsMike]

I'm don't disagree with you on what. Q6600 is certainly the way to go if you are spending this sort of money.

For gaming as long as you're at 2.4GHz (dual or quad) or more I don't see there being that much difference in a lot of games. Some games are very CPU intensive but still the differences will be minor as it's mainly down to GPU power.

Getting an E8400 over 4.5GHz is expensive, especially if you want 4GB of RAM and you need a decent motherboard to run it all where the Q6600 will clock well on most of the mid range boards

[UseItNow]

Pardon me if I put a spanner in the works.

If you are interested in upgrading later this year, why not save the money and buy the E2160, I'm presuming you probably have the motherboard already? If not, why not just buy a cheaper motherboard, such as those with the 610i, 630i, P31 or G31 chipsets and stick in your current graphics card. You seemed to indicate that you had one as you would be looking to upgrade the graphics later on. This way, you save a few quid which can be used on your upgrades, presumably on the Nehalem CPU and Socket-1366 motherboard to go with it?

Some possibilities on the motherboards:
Gigabyte GA-73VM-S2, NF610i Chipset
Computer hardware and software at amazing prices, available online from Scan Computers UK
Gigabyte GA-73PVM-S2H, NF630i Chipset
Computer hardware and software at amazing prices, available online from Scan Computers UK
Abit I-N73HD, NF630i Chipset
Computer hardware and software at amazing prices, available online from Scan Computers UK
Gigabyte GA-P31-S3G, iP31 Express Chipset
Computer hardware and software at amazing prices, available online from Scan Computers UK

Anyway, good luck on your build!

[IAmATeaf]

The words video encoding should sway the decision towards a Q6600. I have mine overclocked to 3.0GHz at stock voltages.

Not too sure about the temps quoted by matty-hodgson as those are insanely low temps which you'd probably not even get with a decent water cooling kit, my Q6600 tops out at around 63,63,60,60 but have since replaced my rear stock adda 80mm fan with a yate loon and that's helped bring the temps down to around 59.

[TooNice]

I am afraid this will likely be a one-shot upgrade unless they somehow manage to mess up the Nehalem. That said, it's worth pointing out that the Nehalem will probably take another 18 months to be affordable anyway considering that it will take a time for RAM makers to shift production of DDR3 at full speed. Between dual and quad, well, it pretty much depends on what you do. For games, it doesn't matter too much between dual/quad. Games aren't optimised for quad, but they aren't held back by it either. But for video encoding, quad beats the advantage of SSE 4.1 from my impression.

[JPreston]

Q6600 seems to have it so far

Pardon me if I put a spanner in the works.

If you are interested in upgrading later this year, why not save the money and buy the E2160, I'm presuming you probably have the motherboard already?

Spanners always welcome

No I'll be buying the motherboard along with the chip (Abit IP35 Dark Raider). As far as RAM goes, it's 4Gb of bog standard ~£65 stuff that I'm getting, so I'll end up RAM limited before I manage to get crazy clock speeds of 4.5Gig+ with a dual core processor. Which makes 3.0 - 3.4 Gig of Q6600 sounds very appealing. I'll be using an Ultima 90 cooler which should allow for reasonable speeds on the Q6600.

I'm not interested in upgrading kater this year per se.....but if I can spend £50 on a processor now and £100 - £150 in a little over year on a chip that will blow a Q6600 away and last me well into nehalem, then that would be a option. But there's a good chance that such a S775 uber-chip will never materialise and everything switches overnight to the new socket like it did with S939.

I guess I'll go for the Q6600.....can always upgrade that in future if it's needed, and worthwhile to do so (which from what you folk are saying, will be unlikely)....and it should last me a long way into nehalem until I get the urge to buy a new CPU, motherboard, PSU and RAM all over again. I thought these PC things were meant to be upgradeable, all I seem to keep from one to the next is the power cable

[shaffaaf27]

well you could get a 780i mobo, which allows for unlinked memory FBS dividers, so you can up the CPU as much as possible, w.o. effecting the RAM.

[AndrewJ]

Q6600 given the issues I have heard with the E8400, I plan on the Q6600 for my next build in 3week

Can't wait!!!!

[TooNice]

I thought these PC things were meant to be upgradeable, all I seem to keep from one to the next is the power cable

Haha, I know what you mean. I also went 939 knowing full well that the next upgrade would require a new motherboard. It made sense though - DDR2 was still too expensive at the time, and at least I was able to carry the DDR RAM and case from the build before that to that build.

I told myself that I would skip Quad-core altogether and go Oct-core, expecting a less one sided core war from AMD and Intel, and that someone would come up with a way to optimise applications for as many cores as available (unlike right now where games are still scale poorly to 4 cores).

The TRUE cooler better works on Nehalem though (without having to pay more than a few quid for new mounting mechanism), or I'd be rather annoyed. I expect pretty much everything else other than the case, cooler, fans to be replaced for the build that follows the 775 platform.