Upgrading from E6400

Hi there I need some help choosing which CPU to upgrade to from my current E6400.

First of all the only reason I'm planning to upgrade is because I'm building a budget PC for a friend and rather than buying them a new cpu I'm going to take £40 for my e6400 and put it towards a new cpu for me. Everyone's a winner :)

I don't really want to spend a lot so I'm looking at the E8200(£100) and the Q8200(£120).

I've basically got 3 questions.

1. Quad core or Dual core? I mainly use it for general desktop stuff and a bit of gaming. Will the quadcore make for a better desktop experience in terms of multitasking or should I just go for the higher clocked E8200.

2. Any other options? Should I look at spending a bit more E8400 etc. or maybe look at the E7xxx series?

3. Is this actually a worthwhile upgrade? Will I see much improvement over what I've got currently?

i wud go for dual core mostly coz of the gaming.

if u dont mind spending the extra money i wud probably go for the 8400

you should see a big increase in performance since the 8400 is a lot faster and will do even better if u decide to overclock it.

Thanks for the reply, why the 8400 over the 8200? I see the 8400 recommended a lot but it's only 10% faster than the 8200 for about a 30% price increase. Does it overclock a lot better or something?

If it's mostly browsing and gaming then I'd second the sticking with a dual core. AFAIK the E7xxx series have a couple of features disabled, including virtualisation. This doesn't matter too much, but if you go with Windows 7 and ever need to use its "XP mode" to run older software this can take advantage of hardware accelerated virtualisation, so if you can afford it it's probably worth getting an E8xxx series.

I doubt you'd notice the difference between the E8200 and E8400 tbh, so unless you're planning some serious overclocking (obviously the E8400 *should* overclock higher because it starts higher, and its higher multiplier means each step on the FSB pushes the clock speed further - as always nothing is guaranteed with overclocking though) I'd go with the E8200. After all, OC it to 3GHz and you've got yourself an E8400 ;)