E8400 or E2160 or Q6600?

[Biscuit]

Hello all.
I suggest that if you can afford it get the Q6600.I have one on a Asus P5Q-deluxe OC'ed to 3.25GHZ with no voltage increases and everything on auto and stock heatsink and fan.My system goes into a reboot loop @ 3.50GHZ without touching anything in the bios.I will be trying later to see how high I can go and still be able to boot and run stable without touching any bios settings other than the fsb.The Q6600 will burn a movie,surf the web,download files from the net and unzip a 7GB winzip game file and run @ 54-57 Celcius.From the reviews if read about the i7 series cpu, the price versus performance increases is just not worth it.For most games right now a good dual core(say e8600)is more than enough for now.I went with the Q6600 as I do a lot of burning and video converting and I wanted the extra oomph of the four cores for that,also I will not have to worry about upgrading for a couple of years at the least.Besides most games are more gpu intensive than cpu(i7 940 with a ati radeon 3500 series is gonna be slower and choppy playing crysis on high,but change the gpu to a Geforce 285 and your gonna crank)For example I play crysis,left4dead,oblivian,metal gear,jericho all on high setting(game auto selected)and all play fine.So in short buy what you need but plan so ya dont have to upgrade for at least 2 yrs at the current level of software develpment.In real life apps anything faster than the Q6600 is just a wast of money,considering if heard claims of the Q6600 being over clocked to 4.0GHZ on high quality air or liquid cooling and matching the i7 940 in performance and sometimes beating it out with the right memory,gpu,cooling and motherboard.

this thread is over a year old...

[Mutley]

But still quite useful...as I'm wondering about the same things (yes, I actually live in a time warp, approximately a year behind every one else).

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Things are a bit different now with the Phenom II available. The Phenom II X3 720 is a good choice at £120 and the Phenom II X3 710 is available for around £100. The E5200 is available for under £60 and is a good overclocker. The Athlon X2 7750+ is faster than the E5200 at stock speeds and is a better choice than the E5200 if no overclocking is involved.
The Q6600 is the only processor still relevant but it now costs more and the newer Q660 processors are worst overclockers than the older one. To further compound things the Q6600 is sandwiched between the Phenom II X4 810 and Phenom II X4 920 which offer better or similar performance at stock speeds and also are good overclockers in their own right.

[Maccer101]

My Q6600 at stock speed runs at av. core temp of 30c idle, measured with 3 different apps and at 50c running Prime for 10mins with case fans running pretty much silent (2 intake 1 exhaust) so these temps are totally achievable. It is essentialy winter though...

Darn.. just noticed the age of the thread too

[bledd]

q6600