Q9400 or Q6600 or E8500?

Which one should i get?

  • Q9400

    Votes: 15 46.9%

  • E8500

    Votes: 9 28.1%

  • Q6600

    Votes: 8 25.0%
  • Total voters
    32
  • Poll closed .
C

crazyboy515

Limp Gawd
Joined
Mar 29, 2009
Messages
135
i would only play games and a little photo editing. as long as the game runs on all high with smooth gameplay. what should i go for? q9400 e8500 q6600
 
Get the E8500 hands down. It will overclock higher with less heat/voltage than the quads, and has double the L2 cache over the Q9400, and will be an average 10% faster clock-for-clock than any Conroe-based Core 2. You won't need a quad for most games for a while, and by then the i5 and faster versons of the i7 will be out.
 
Mr. Bluntman said:
Get the E8500 hands down. It will overclock higher with less heat/voltage than the quads, and has double the L2 cache over the Q9400, and will be an average 10% faster clock-for-clock than any Conroe-based Core 2. You won't need a quad for most games for a while, and by then the i5 and faster versons of the i7 will be out.
Click to expand...

so ur saying most of the games, they only use 2 cores?
 
crazyboy515 said:
so ur saying most of the games, they only use 2 cores?
Click to expand...

Pretty much. It really depends on what you play the most. If you are into flight sims and RTS games, you will see more benefit. For FPS and most everything else, you will see more benefit from a cheaper, faster clocked dual core and a faster graphics card. However by the time quad cores will be the norm requirement i7's 32nm successor Sandy Bridge should be out.

If you did more than just gaming and the occasional Photoshop, I would recommend the Q9550, albeit more expensive the extra 6MB total L2 cache will provide a decent boost over the Q9x00 series.
 
crazyboy515 said:
what does quad support today? would the e8500 last for 1+ year as of today?
Click to expand...

Well, anything UE3 based (Unreal Tournament 3, Bioshock, Mirror's Edge, Gears of War) scale nearly linearly with more cores if you are not GPU limited, and so does Far Cry 2. Lost Planet, Grand Theft Auto 4 (leaving shitty port comments aside), Supreme Commander, Flight Simulator X, and John Woo's Stranglehold also scale really well with 4 cores. Everything else usually only takes advantage of up to two.

Will an E8x00 be sufficent for the next 12 months? Yes. I don't plan on upgrading my E8400 until next year (unless I can find a killer deal on a Q9650), since it will be more than sufficent for gaming and internet browsing (my main uses for my rig). Then it's i7 time...

/drool
 
The e8500 is cheaper and will outperform the q6600 in games hands down. Really this poll should just be between the q9400 and the e8500.
 
Quads are great for multitasking but for gaming get the E8500.

On the flip side if you like a warm office quads make great room heaters.
 
I would go with the Q9400.
For games, remember that video card is king.
 
Not meaning to thread crap or anything, but what're you running right now? From my experience CPU's seriously only need upgrading every 4 years as is the expected lifetime of a desktop CPU. **I'm just now feeling the CPU bottleneck on my pentium 4.**

To provide a little more useful information, quad cores are better for your video editing and photoshopping, whilst the e8500 will generally provide better performance everywhere else. As it has been said the newest games scale better with multiple cores. On a broader note, all of the processors mentioned are sufficient to run all modern and future games. I'd say 80% of the time computers are GPU limited, not CPU. Thus I suggest you purchase the e8500 and save your leftover cash for a newer graphics card, if needed.

One thing worth mentioning though: with windows 7 comes the possibilities of graphics acceleration done with spare CPU power (unless I've misread something), which would more than likely work better with a quad core than a dual core.
 
I like quads for gaming and general multitasking but duals do oc higher on average. I chose to jump on the multi core processors when they first came out and I have not looked back. It's funny when duals first came out everyone said "oh a higher clocked single is better than a dual" and then would regurgitate a list of games that ran better on the higher clocked single core rig but the hand writing was on the wall and I have found the more cores the better. Good luck with what ever you choose!
 
Most games are GPU-bound unless you're gaming on a 30" panel w/a CF/SLI setup or something, so even if you get an extra 200MHz or even 500MHz out of the dual core, it's not gonna make much of a difference... The games that do use the extra cores will benefit from the Quad even at slower speeds though, and that's where future games are heading, plus the quad will help with all your other chores (video encoding, multitasking, etc). I'd go with the Q6600 hands down.

If you're building a C2D or C2Q right right now it's because you don't wanna spend the premium on an i7 rig, even if it's only $200-250 more... So why spend a lil' bit more on a faster quad core or a dual core, just go bang-for-the-buck all the way and OC the Q6600 as best you can 'till i5 or your next upgrade!
 
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