upgrade advice

[polonyc2]

I currently have an E8400 going on 2 years now and am happy with it but I want to do a bit of future proofing...I use my system mainly for gaming (Crysis, Fallout 3, Modern Warfare 2, DiRT 2 etc)...would getting a Q9650 be a worthy upgrade?...I know most games do not take advantage of more then 2 cores but like I said I want to semi future proof...plus being able to multi task would be nice as well

the Core i7's and upcoming Gulftown CPU's seem like overkill as a gaming CPU...taking $$ out of the equation and basing it on performance alone, would I notice any performance differences in the Q9650 vs my current E8400...and would the Q9650 last me for another 2-3 years?...or would any of the current i7's be a better investment?

 

[heatlesssun]

For most games an E8400 and Q9650 at equivalent speeds will deliver about the same performance. Now the Q9650 overall with two more cores has a lot more horsepower to spare and will crush an E8400 in highly threaded apps but games aren't generally highly threaded.

Save your money and invest in an i7 at a latter time. My i7 sig rig is running MUCH better than I thought it would. I'm getting a noticeable boost in performance in EVERYTHING coming from a QX9650 @ 3.67Ghz.

 

[polonyc2]

Save your money and invest in an i7 at a latter time. My i7 sig rig is running MUCH better than I thought it would. I'm getting a noticeable boost in performance in EVERYTHING coming from a QX9650 @ 3.67Ghz.

I wouldn't have figured that much of a performance gain going from a QX9650 to an i7...except for the heat issue the QX looked like it could hang with a similarly clocked i7