Q6600 or E6850

[Bluecube]

Very few, if any games, can make use of dual cores yet alone quad cores. Quad cores are only useful (at the mo) for video editting/ 3D design as mentioned above and even then only with the heavy duty pro packages.

[NightshadowUK]

I second that - games are all about what graphics card you have. So long as your CPU's not bottlenecking, you don't have to worry about it.

[Nemz0r]

main uses will probably be gaming (DX10)

I know for sure Bioshock, one of the upcoming DX10 games will be heavily multithreaded (8 threads ). I also believe Crysis is -- no reason to believe it isn't -- but I haven't looked into that so I won't present that as fact.

So the Q6600 will definitely be king of the hill, it's got my vote anyways ! *Goes back to drooling over Bioshock and Crysis for a few months more...*.

[excalibur2]

Personally I'd get the Q6600, some PC6400 memory, overclock it to 3GHz, and then chuckle to myself.

HuH only 3ghz? My cheapy E4300 is running sweet at 3ghz......I'm not interested in changing unless 4ghz plus is the norm for overclocking.

[NightshadowUK]

But then that's 3GHz on 4 cores, plus you've gotta take the extra heat into consideration.

[twoblacklines]

buy quad core.

even if you are running a single dual core application, it allows all your processes and other apps such as winamp or utorrent to run on other threads or cores