E8400 or Q6600? - Which would you buy?

[joshwa]

Quadcore - then join Hexus Folding @ Home

[Bhavv]

even though i have an e8400 id still say the q6600 is the way to go...

q6600= £140
e8400= £170

Voted q6600.

If I were buying right now then obviously I would have picked the Q6600 at these prices.

I can be happy I got mine for £129

[Timo]

IMHO quaddies all the way, they may not be the best at the moment due to poor utilisation but it a couple of months time quaddies will pull ahead of the pack by miles.

Multi cores (>8 cores) have been supported for five years or more in graphics/audio/video software.

[ikix]

Quad, overall i would say better performance and the lifespan is obviously longer.

[teodor_ch]

Dont you mean 3.6 x 4?

yeap, sorry.

anyway,
for an aircooled system for gaming, dual core is a must for me

[Az00123]

I really doubt you're going to see much a difference between 400-500mhz (typical oc's between q6600/e8400 ). So if you don't see a huge difference i don't see how this argument can continue to exist, I really don't think the e8400 gets 20% more framerates so it's not worth going for a quad now (correct me if i'm wrong ) so you might as well go for as new tech as you can when you buy to increase the longetivity(sp?) of your purchase and to get the most for your money (3-4 years @ least before a needed cpu upgrade as opposed to 1-2)

[TAKTAK]

Multi cores (>8 cores) have been supported for five years or more in graphics/audio/video software.

but theres still an awful lot of apps that don't fully utilize the 4 cores

[Link97]

I'm fine with my quad core, great choice.

Think about when you go to a LAN party and all your buddies go "yo, wut specs yo' got?"

How much cooler does "quad core" sound?

[moogle]

How much cooler does "quad core" sound?

choosing a cpu because it sounds "cool" is quite silly, but yeah quad core here.

[Timo]

but theres still an awful lot of apps that don't fully utilize the 4 cores

Which apps don't utilise multi cores thesedays?

Probably more likely that games don't, so much.

Even if the app natively doesn't utilise four cores, Windows will. So if you have lots of tasks open, they will be spread across the number of cores. It's not as effective as native multi threading (which spreads the load when using just one task), but it's still very useful if you're multi-tasking. But if you're using a multi-threaded app, the performance will rocket on a quad.

[Robert]

Quite a few games make use now anyways...

[Bugbait]

I really doubt you're going to see much a difference between 400-500mhz (typical oc's between q6600/e8400 ). So if you don't see a huge difference i don't see how this argument can continue to exist, I really don't think the e8400 gets 20% more framerates so it's not worth going for a quad now (correct me if i'm wrong ) so you might as well go for as new tech as you can when you buy to increase the longetivity(sp?) of your purchase and to get the most for your money (3-4 years @ least before a needed cpu upgrade as opposed to 1-2)

In the context of gaming the various benchmarks splattered all over the Net would indicate otherwise. Unless you're running 1920+ resolutions with high AA then a lot of games still show improvements with high CPU speed (okay, Crysis probably won't).

If you don't encode media or render then what is the use of the extra cores? How many games actually use quad cores? How many use it efficiently? I'm curious. My main PC had an overclocked Q6600 but since I don't multitask as much these days I don't see the point in having 4 cores.

I upgrade every year so never expect my hardware to last longer than that. A PC depreciates to zero after 3 years as far as the tax man is concerned so it would be pointless for me to retain one for that long .

It's like having 8Gig of RAM in XP when your peak usage never exceeds 2Gig. Sure, sounds cool but what's the point?

[Bugbait]

Quite a few games make use now anyways...

I'm curious to know which ones? I know Valve and other FPS focused companies are definitely moving towards quad if they're not already on it. How many RTS games use quad though? Pretty sure WoW, even after the recent multi-threaded patch still doesn't use more than two. My higher clocked dual core gets higher FPS than my old, lower clock quad.

I'm not doubting that those who use quad enabled applications (eg. Media encoding and rendering) or heavily multi-task will benefit from a quad but I do question a gamer's need for it. I was encoding at fantastic framerates with DivX on the quad that my dual couldn't dream of touching but that's a singular example.

EDIT: Here's a random article I pulled off Google in relation to this: Does Quad Core Matter?. Work is quite restrictive so can't access them all. Media and synthetic benchmarks really show off the quad, the games do not. One of the things I like to do is burn 2 or 3 DVD's at a time. Due to IO bottlenecks a quad core does not noticeably improve the performance over a dual. All comes down to usage...

[sammytomjohn]

[QUOTE=-iceblade^;1400209]what of the issue of chip degradation?

already hered of peoples exxx series chips blowin because of overvoltages and its really not known how long this series of cpu will last overclocked at such speed

i do know ebay uk have some1 selling go step q6600 brand new retail boxed for 130 pound included postage

thinkin of gettin 1 myself changin from my e6600 is it worth the change??

i encode videos and play games

[Blitzen]

[QUOTE=sammytomjohn;1402101]

what of the issue of chip degradation?

already hered of peoples exxx series chips blowin because of overvoltages and its really not known how long this series of cpu will last overclocked at such speed

i do know ebay uk have some1 selling go step q6600 brand new retail boxed for 130 pound included postage

thinkin of gettin 1 myself changin from my e6600 is it worth the change??

i encode videos and play games

Definitely is.
E6600 x 2 = Q6600

You E6600 should still fetch £80 or more aswell.

[Bugbait]

[QUOTE=sammytomjohn;1402101]

what of the issue of chip degradation?

already hered of peoples exxx series chips blowin because of overvoltages and its really not known how long this series of cpu will last overclocked at such speed

This could be due to carelessness since the "older" 65nm chips (ie. SLACR) are rated up to 1.5v compared to only 1.3625v on the 45nm chips. The upper limit for non-extreme overclocking has been high 1.4 to 1.5v for some time so it could be just a matter of adjustment.

What voltages were these people running at the time they killed their CPU's?