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E8400 Vs. E8500: Does it really matter?

S

Seizure Explosion

Weaksauce
Joined
Aug 16, 2005
Messages
116
I'm making a rig to hold me for a good 3 years or at least until Nehalems have a decent price/performance ratio. I'll be gaming with this but I want to constrain the price as much as possible to have money left over whatever may come up in college. So far I'm getting a 4850 with a P45 Mobo that I (correct me if I'm wrong) believe should be quite sufficient along with an NZXT HUSH case and a BFG 680 watt PSU, and 4 Gigs or RAM. Altogether it costs a very reasonable $660, before shipping or MIR's.

The only thing left to do now is pick a processor. I've basically ruled out Quads until Nehalem hits because right now Dual Cores see the most love in non-synthetic gaming benchmarks, and I'm not one to ignore the pretty graphs. Right now it's between the 8400 and the 8500. With an $80 price difference, I can't help but think that there must be something fantastically important that sets them apart, but I can't seem to find anything particularly attractive that the 8500 has and the 8400 does not. 9.5 multi but does that really help for overclocking at all?

So, what is it about the 8500 that justifies the price, and am I better off just going with the 8400 and holding out for Nehalem?
 
3 things:
1: Would look at a P35 instead of a P45 if you arent overclocking. The only things P45 does better is better FSB1600 support and it runs slightly cooler IIRC.
2: Nehalem WILL NOT run a P45 board. If you plan on upgrading to a york in 6 months fine, but dont expect to run a nehalem on this build, ever.
3: For 160 Mhz, get the cheaper one and bump the FSB by like 5Mhz. No risk, and you save the $80 (although you get WiC with the E8500 from newegg, which is worth $30 to me at least). Bother are FSB1333/45nm/6MiB parts. Half a mult value isnt worth it. And at 3Ghz on a wolfdale you wont be constrained for gaming until you get into a GTX280 or so GPU. You may be future bound by some games that run better on a quad, though I really dont see any interesting games on the horizon for me.
 
first off current games do not make use of more then two cores, but that's current games, as quad core becomes more the normal I think developers will start using them. having said that I would save the cash and put it to a second video card and a X38 motherboard. for games that is the most bang for the buck.
 
I realize that the P45 won't run Nehalem, which is why I'm not springing for the $200+ motherboards, but I do intend to overclock to as much as 4GHz if necessary to keep up before an affordable but powerful Nehalem CPU/Mobo combo in late 2009-mid 2010. Ideally this rig should last me through the end of 2010 if needed, with overclocking and possibly another graphics card in crossfire. This doesn't need to be completely future-proofed, but it would ideally be able to survive games on at least medium settings at 1650 resolutions with a fluid frame rate.
 
The only difference between the E8400 and E8500 is the higher multiplier in the latter. The E8400 and P45 motherboard combo will be plenty to go far past 4GHz, so there isn't really a need to go with the E8500.
 
Fair enough. And now the next big question: do I take all the money I saved on the processor and MIR's and go out and buy a velociraptor? Hmm....
 
I wouldn't. I think most people will agree that raptors are terrible price per performance. If you only need 300 gb of space, its a great drive.

IMO for gaming, gpu is the most important but. If you save 200 on the hdd, almost 100 on the processor, plus your 4850 money, you're in the 4870x2 range.

I think everyone will agree an e8400, 4gb ram, 640 gb wd drive and a 4870x2 will be faster for you than an e8500, 4gb raml veloticy raptor and a 4850.

Put your extra money in the gpu for a gaming rig, you'll be far better off.
 
Cloud15x said:
I think everyone will agree an e8400, 4gb ram, 640 gb wd drive and a 4870x2 will be faster for you than an e8500, 4gb raml veloticy raptor and a 4850.

Put your extra money in the gpu for a gaming rig, you'll be far better off.
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Agreed. Plus get a P35.... everyone pretty much agrees P45 is just a higher #.. NO REAL advantage for it.

e8400 + P35 + 4gb + 640Gb WD + higher end GPU
 
How much storage for a OS/Game drive do you really need? One of the brand new announced (but not on the market yet?) 64GB SSDs will outperform a raptor, essentially beating it at its own game (great performance, small space).
 
I have a raptor and I love it... That said, I would not chose it over a 4870
 
in terms of the hdd, a single 640GB drive is plenty fast, two in raid-0 would out perform the velociraptor by significant marine, and four in raid-5 would be like a .50 cal barette vs a mosquito (nvm the mozzy, where'd the tree go?)

A comfortable medium would be maybe 4 320's in raid-5? lots of space and redundancy, striping means lots of speed... (relatively) large CPU overhead though, but @ 4GHz you wont have any trouble with that.

I actually quite like the idea of four 320's in raid 5, 1TB of storage and I'd estimate over 100mb/s sustained. Next customer I have who needs a setup with redundancy and 1TB of space with a little extra speed I just might do that for... I'll bench it too...

And on that note the SSDs are also blazing fast, with the new consumer grade ones we've been promised thats not a bad alternative.

Anyways, enough about hard drives; P45 is (as far as I can tell,) identical silicon to P35 just binned higher, as such you can expect higher OC's. Do with that information what you will, but at $150 some of the DFI's look mighty nice.

And no, you don't want to spend the extra $50 to get an extra .5 X on your cpu multiplier, simply not worth it to an overclocker. I wouldn't even do it for $20, then again I'm the guy who goes for the cheapest SKU with that much L2 (on such and such a chip). I'm an E6600 and E6300 kinda guy.
 
Valset said:
first off current games do not make use of more then two cores, but that's current games, as quad core becomes more the normal I think developers will start using them. having said that I would save the cash and put it to a second video card and a X38 motherboard. for games that is the most bang for the buck.
Click to expand...
there are 2 I can think of right off the top of my head and thats Lost Planet and UT3. ;)
 
Okay right now I think I'm looking at the 8400 with a nice big WD drive and throwing in an extra 4850. I don't think I'll see much gain out of 4870 seeing as to how my maximum resolution is 1650, and the main difference between the two cards is the GDDR5 RAM that really only gets a workout at higher resolutions.

And now the next question: is this beefy enough got two cards?
 
Seizure Explosion said:
Okay right now I think I'm looking at the 8400 with a nice big WD drive and throwing in an extra 4850. I don't think I'll see much gain out of 4870 seeing as to how my maximum resolution is 1650, and the main difference between the two cards is the GDDR5 RAM that really only gets a workout at higher resolutions.

And now the next question: is this beefy enough got two cards?
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I'm not sure I get this logic. You are contemplating passing on the faster single card (4870) to get two slower cards (4850) to run in Crossfire because the faster card is overkill? Wouldn't that make the Crossfire solution double-overkill?
 
Danny Bui said:
Yes. But at that price, you can do better:
Corsair 750TX 750W PSU - $98

To be fair though, that BFG PSU is a newly released product. So it may take some time for it to drop in price.
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+1, and if your not looking at future proofing then a single 4850 would work, going dual is overkill for your monitor. I am planning on putting a couple of 4850 1gb in mine when they come out (if they are reasonable but that is for a 1920 by 1200)
 
I've got the RaptorX and its fast, but honestly not that much faster then like the RE2 or other high-end models from WD. If you want your computer to last, get the bigger drive. Also, just go with the 4870. That seems to be worth the premium. No need for two cards if you are on a budget. Not sure about the E8500, but I've got E8400 and I have no complaints.
 
Forceman said:
I'm not sure I get this logic. You are contemplating passing on the faster single card (4870) to get two slower cards (4850) to run in Crossfire because the faster card is overkill? Wouldn't that make the Crossfire solution double-overkill?
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Not entirely. First off, for the resolution I'm playing at the 4870's GDDR5 is what's overkill. Benchmarks tell me that high-quality poorly-optimized games like (okay, only) Crysis may still see frame dips with a single 4850 to 15 or 20 FPS, and I do so hate it when I drop below 25. For the same price (approximately) as one $300 4870, I could just as well buy two 4850's for ~$150 apiece. That said, you're right that it could be overkill, and I'll probably wait until I actually need the extra the power to go CF, but which time 4850's will have dropped prices, probably to around $100 with MIR. Hard to believe these things are so cheap as it is though.
 
I would recommend the E8400. The faster speeds with the E8500 would only be a value to benchmarking. In real world use I bet you would not be able to tell the differance.
 
Crossfire on a P35 or P45 board is a bad idea. you wont get 2 16x pcie lanes, its 16x +4x when working in crossfire.
 
banned_user said:
Crossfire on a P35 or P45 board is a bad idea. you wont get 2 16x pcie lanes, its 16x +4x when working in crossfire.
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The P45 is 8 x 8 in Crossfire (both off the northbridge) - that's the one real difference between it and the P35.
 
Seizure Explosion said:
Right now it's between the 8400 and the 8500. With an $80 price difference, I can't help but think that there must be something fantastically important that sets them apart, but I can't seem to find anything particularly attractive that the 8500 has and the 8400 does not. 9.5 multi but does that really help for overclocking at all?
Click to expand...

I guess these three days made a decent difference. The E8500 is $210 on newegg at the moment. And if you can find an E8400 for $130, please share.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115036

It was also my understanding that the e8500 cores were binned for higher fsb, and can achieve better top clocks. Besides, if you're motherboard turns out to be the limiting factor in overclocking, the higher multi can push the cpu a couple hundred megahertz faster with the same bus speed. I'd say that's worth another $20-30, wouldn't you guys?
 
FinalSight said:
I guess these three days made a decent difference. The E8500 is $210 on newegg at the moment. And if you can find an E8400 for $130, please share.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115036

It was also my understanding that the e8500 cores were binned for higher fsb, and can achieve better top clocks. Besides, if you're motherboard turns out to be the limiting factor in overclocking, the higher multi can push the cpu a couple hundred megahertz faster with the same bus speed. I'd say that's worth another $20-30, wouldn't you guys?
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Yes, except that the motherboard almost never seems to be the limiting factor. Almost any P35 board can do 500 FSB, as long as your RAM can handle it. I don't think anybody really knows how much binning Intel is doing with these chips - the E8500's may get better clocks, but probably not enough to be worth the price difference - but that is really your call. If it was me, I'd save the money.
 
If the e8500 was a full multiplier more than the e8400 (rather than .5), I could see it as worthy. ;)
 
I've owned 10 wolfdales from e8400,e3110, to e8500 and they all overclock to almost the same 24/7clocks. The only time really to buy a e8500 is if you have a 780I board with a lower fsb.
 
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