To quad or not for longivity?

OblivionLord

Limp Gawd
Joined
Apr 16, 2004
Messages
168
Would it be better to buy a Q6600 to last me 4 years or pay for a E6600 now and after 2 years buy the equivilant in price at that time? Id also have to upgrade the mobo most likley if I go the second route. I know that mobo chipsets do improve everytime a new one comes out also. If I go the first route then Id be using the 1 mobo for the 4 year period vs the upgrade by going the second route.

Q6600 is said to be at $530 in Q2 this year and E6600 is also said to be $224 Q2.

Thoughts?
 
not knowing what the quad will do in overclocks and such...I still go for the quad I think.If you are gonna wait until 4 year for next upgrade...its not much money is it if you split it up over such a long time.
Just stay in 1 saturday and you have it saved already :) or better yet..stay in 2 weekends and get a qx6700 or something!
:D
 
Seeing that the quad Q6600 is more than double that of its dual counterpart .. I'm thinking that a purchase of a quad now would be for the enthusiast since it is so heavily priced. Im rather liking the option of buying a Dual now and 2 years from now put that money into a quad at that point when prices go down.
 
I would think that unless you have some programs that you run frequently that can actually utilize 4 cores, you should still go for the dual-core E6600 and overclock it. By the time that multiple cores can be utilized effectively they will have dropped considerely in price and from an economic viewpoint atleast you'll be better off upgrading in two years to the equivalent of todays E6600. (the Quad 6600 is more than twice the price of the Dual 6600 currently, and it will still be so in Q2)

And that's not even considering the time-value of money...
 
Wow, 4 years is a long time. Even 2 years is a long time.
If you game and are looking forward to Crysis and Alan Wake, you will definitely be going quad-core when those games are available. But when these games will be released is anyones guess.
Going quad now means you will be set for a while. Going cheap dual now and quad later will probably cost more, but you will most likely end up with a faster quad. So your choice.
 
If you are just a gamer, my recommendation is go with the E6600 for now. There are simply not enough uses for you and it might be better to wait for the next gen of quad cores. Not because the quads slated for 2008 Q1 will be any faster necessarily, but from what I've read will certainly use less power and therefore *hopefully* run a bit cooler. The current quad definately runs very hot and if you want to OC it almost requires water cooling if you want to run 3.2+.

I will say that if you run apps for graphics (PS-CS2) rendering (3DMax) video encoding (Adobe Premier) or dvd encoding (DVDShrink) a lot, then the massive boost in performance would be worth your while right now, especially if you want to run these in tandom (say ripping a movie while your editing in photoshop.) Why wait? Go for it.

However, if you are just a gamer I would consider holding off, but only if you set the time frame at around a year though. If you are thinking of holding out for 2 or more years, then you might as well go with the quad now as I would imagine in a year we will finally start to see some games come out to support it and definately more and more apps will.

On a side note, if you go with the Kentsfied, research those 680i boards though. Can OC very easily with the multiplier on the QX6700, but from what I've been reading it currently looks like OC'ing the Q6600 is practically non-existant on that board since you can't raise the FSB beyond around 300-330 with either chip. The forums at both NVIDIA and EVGA are complaining about this, but still no response if it's fixable through a bios update or a new revision of the board. Might be safer going with a P5B or P5W instead.
 
Raindbow 6 and anything Unreal 3 engine related is multicore supported. Im sure Crysis and other games of the sort that come out this year will also be multicore plus all the ported games from the consoles since they are all multicore.
 
Definitely jump on a dual core as soon as you can, you'll come to appreciate the multicore computing experience. I was tempted by the quad but to be honest, it's pretty expensive right now. Maybe when quads drop down to the pricepoint of my E6600... which actually shouldn't take that long at all, maybe even less than two years.
 
Seeing that I do a bit of gaming and the majority of today games are GPU dependant then it really isn't going to matter if I do get the quad or not. I'll more than likley be running the CPU just a little over stock at like 2.8-3.0 and keeping the videocard at stock. I'm quite certain to say that the E6600 even at stock is not a bottleneck in any way running a 8800GTX at stock.

Now heres a thought..... Since a PhysX card allows some extra options within some games like City Of Villans with extra this and that acting like an extra core to the cpu then if they made games that reconized the additional cores to allow additional options just like a PhysX card then at that point I can see getting a Quad. It still falls into the Enthusiast category since you don't necessarily need the extra nicks and nacks on top of Highest ingame quality settings. Kind of the same with not needing to go SLI/Crossfire unless you absolutly got the money to spend comfortably and want the absolute best performance at highest grafic settings.

I don't want to turn this into a Quad vs PhysX debate but...

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2828&p=3

As you can see the benefit from going from 1 core to 2 without a PhysX card is more beneficial than using 1 core and a PhysX card. Plus the CPU cores are utlized outside of just gaming when runing programs that are coded for multithread processing.
 
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