E8400 or Q6600? - Which would you buy?

[Blitzen]

You got to 1.4 and it will be detremental. Higher than than the process speeds up.

You will need that much to go 4ghz+

[Bugbait]

You got to 1.4 and it will be detremental. Higher than than the process speeds up.

You will need that much to go 4ghz+

I'll let you know I'm running mine at 1.4v. I only expect it to last a year and I can always rip the Q6600 out of the HTPC if I kill it. RealTemp reports idle at 31-33C and Orthos load at 47-48C. CoreTemp reports idle at 41-43C and Orthos load at 57-58C. Not sure which to believe.

[kalniel]

Games such as UT3, World in Conflict and Lost planet take advantage of multiple cores more than clock speed.

Games such as Crysis, HL2 ep2 and Quake 4 do better on a faster dual core.

If it was a choice between those two, for use now, I'd go with the faster dual core still - by the time all games will need quad core I think the Q6600 will be a bit slow anyway.

[Bugbait]

If it was a choice between those two, for use now, I'd go with the faster dual core still - by the time all games will need quad core I think the Q6600 will be a bit slow anyway.

That was my reasoning for going "backwards" from a quad to a dual. I want something that is faster for my current games. If the games I play suddenly took advantage of quad processing I would upgrade immediately.

[fatfisher]

That was my choice a couple of weeks ago when i made my new pc, i chose the Q6600, mainly because i didnt plan on upgrading for a good while!! Seems to love video editing and the occasional go on Crysis!

So i would choose the Q6600!!

[ikix]

If your upgrading fairly often (abour a year or so) then the dual core is the better choice but if it is for a long term buy then the quad core is the way to go.