E8400 or Q6600? - Which would you buy?

Hi. I would like to create an opinion poll of which of these two processors people would rather buy today, and would appreciate if you provided your opinions on the two.

I have seen and discussed both sides of the debate to death on other forums - There are some people that believe a higher clocked E8400 gives more bang for buck, while others believe that more cores still offer better performance.

Both of the proccessors cost around the same price now, so lets take price out of the disscusion. Although in some places one could cost more then the other, the price on both processors is appealing enough to make either a very good buy for the money.

I personally got the E8400 after I heard it could clock to 4 Ghz and higher, and that it does. I am currently limited to a 450 Fsb and 4.05 Ghz due to my ram being unstable at higher frequencies, but I have been able to orthos stress the CPU at 4.275 Ghz and it was stable for over 2 hours. Unfortunately my Ram causes system freezes at higher frequencies though, and it is super PI 32m unstable anywhere over 900 Mhz. I have some new ram on order which should allow me to push my CPU even furthur. Basically, as an overclocker and gamer, I chose the E8400 over the Q6600.

Feel free to share your opinions on which one you would rather buy and your reasons too.

if you update your system every 4 years then quad
if you update more often 1-2 years then the dual

again, games? dual core
encoding? quad

Q6600 is extremely good in games (as is the dual core.

This subject has been done to death on a few occassions now (search for them) but the fact remains that the Q6600 will still be around long after the dual cores are with the dinosaurs.

Try the benchmarking (although synthetic).
Put a Q6600 in the rig at 3.6ghz and test.
Then replace it with a E8400 @ 4.0ghx using all the same equipment as before and test.

The E8400, although a higher clock speed, will come off second best.

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Originally Posted by teodor_ch

if you update your system every 4 years then quad
if you update more often 1-2 years then the dual

again, games? dual core
encoding? quad

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I do a complete rebuild every year and to my mind, the Quad offered the best performance vs value.

Gaming: E8400.
Multimedia work: Q6600
Combination of both: Q6600

Yea I upgrade something like every 6 months and manage to sell my old parts for almost full price on Ebay o.O. I already a better 2x2 Gb ram set on order to replace my poor 4x1 Gb. The new ram cost £70, I sell my current ram for £35 a pair (Still costs £43+ delivery brand new).

I want to see an article of the Q6600 vs the E8400. I read one comparing the Q6600 and the E6850 which left me thinking 'But the E8400 would be better then the E6850'.

But when I see quad cores capable of similar speeds or higher then my E8400 for a good price, I'll upgrade again :p

I would say now, to buy whichever one is cheapest. like recently on Newegg the Q6600 was $180 while the E8400 was still $210, so in that case deffinately buy the Q6600. But if the prices are the other way around, then buy the E8400 for games, or pay a bit extra for the Q6600 on a multimedia PC. They vary just about everywhere.

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Originally Posted by Blitzen

I do a complete rebuild every year and to my mind, the Quad offered the best performance vs value.

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99% of the games performs worse on a Q9300 or Q6600 than a E8400 (even without overclock)

i suppose you encode >33% of the time you spend on your pc

what of the issue of chip degradation? it's not known just how long the wolfies can handle overvolting...

whereas the quads can take a real beating

3.6x4 sounds a lot better than 4.5x2 to me

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Originally Posted by -iceblade^

3.6x4 sounds a lot better than 4.5x2 to me

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i agree, but when it comes to gaming you will probably have to choose between 3.6x2 vs 4.5x2 (the latter make it 4-4.2 to be more realistic)

CPU-Z Validator 2.1 :D

Depends on what you use your PC for. As others have stated, for most games, especially non-FPS a higher clocked dual core will outperform a quad. I say non-FPS since very few non-FPS games use more than two cores, assuming they're multi-threaded at all. I don't game as much as I used to so if anyone knows different please correct me. I moved from a Q6600 (@3.6GHz) to a E8200 (@4GHz) for my main PC. I could've gone the E8400 but I wanted to see how high I could push an E8200. My WoW (CPU dependent) framerate doesn't drop as much as it used to when the immediate area is densely populated with other players.

Since I was building a new HTPC I didn't feel the need to multitask as much so I've moved the Q6600 into the HTPC for simultaneous downloads, decoding, encoding, etc.

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Originally Posted by teodor_ch

99% of the games performs worse on a Q9300 or Q6600 than a E8400 (even without overclock)

i suppose you encode >33% of the time you spend on your pc

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You got anything to back that up?
If so, how much worse? Not noticeable as the difference is so minimal.

The Q6600 (or any quad) has the best of both worlds <------fact.

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Originally Posted by Blitzen

You got anything to back that up?
If so, how much worse? Not noticeable as the difference is so minimal.

The Q6600 (or any quad) has the best of both worlds <------fact.

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even though not the most reliable web site...
check the different benchmarks
Desktop CPU Charts - Tom's Hardware

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

q6600= &#163;140
e8400= &#163;170 (from scan)
i like my dual core but its not worth &#163;170 by any means, i got it for just under &#163;125 at launch and i was worth it then when the q600 was around &#163;160, now i would go with the quad even if the e8400 was around 130.

Dual core is best at games, at this time but that will change. Thing is, quad and dual core they dont really matter because games are hardly cpu intensive anymore except for the odd few like supcom( which still isnt that bad) and then you have the gfx cards being the bottleneck.

Voted q6600.

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Originally Posted by teodor_ch

even though not the most reliable web site...
check the different benchmarks
Desktop CPU Charts - Tom's Hardware

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They are all old games and all on 32Bit.

Neither core is overcloked either to make the comparison.

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Originally Posted by teodor_ch

i agree, but when it comes to gaming you will probably have to choose between 3.6x2 vs 4.5x2 (the latter make it 4-4.2 to be more realistic)

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Dont you mean 3.6 x 4?

I use my computer mainly for multimedia (music production, graphics (2D and 3D), encoding, video editing), and a little gaming.

So it was always going to be a quad for me. A dual never entered the equation.

Depends what you want to do on it.

Surely gaming is often more dependent on the GPU, than the CPU?

Either way, E8500 is around the same price-range as the Q6600, and the Q6600 could just be OC'd to 3.GHz or more, which would make it a moot point. I'd never go with a dual, given the similar price and the Q6600 overclocking potential.

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.

Quadcore - then join Hexus Folding @ Home :D

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Originally Posted by Hicks12

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

q6600= £140
e8400= £170

Voted q6600.

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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 :)

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Originally Posted by TAKTAK

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.

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

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

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Originally Posted by Blitzen

Dont you mean 3.6 x 4?

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yeap, sorry.

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

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 :D) 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)

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Originally Posted by Timo

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

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

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?

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Originally Posted by Link97

How much cooler does "quad core" sound?

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

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Originally Posted by TAKTAK

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

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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.

Quite a few games make use now anyways...

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Originally Posted by 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 :D) 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)

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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?

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Originally Posted by Robert

Quite a few games make use now anyways...

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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...

[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 :O_o1:

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

i encode videos and play games

[QUOTE=sammytomjohn;1402101]

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Originally Posted by -iceblade^

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 :O_o1:

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

i encode videos and play games

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Definitely is.
E6600 x 2 = Q6600

You E6600 should still fetch £80 or more aswell.

[QUOTE=sammytomjohn;1402101]

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Originally Posted by -iceblade^

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

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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?

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+

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Originally Posted by 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+

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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.

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.

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Originally Posted by kalniel

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.

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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.

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!!

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.