E8400 or q6600

for you to decide, i just want to know techspot's opinions to these two processors

as for i am buying one soon since my b day and CHRiSTMAS =] is coming up

so yeah ... THANK YOU =]

E8400

The E8400 is on sale at Microcenter for $149.95 until the 28th, (Dec 2008).

I still think the dual cores are a better idea for gaming, with the quads being better for video encoding and the like. The Q6600's price is way down, but it's "old tech" (well sort of) @ 65nm. The E8400 is at the absolute sweet spot of price vs. performance. (IMHO, of course).

My son's birthday is the 14th of Dec. so we sort of gloss over it a tad, monetarily speaking. Too close to Christmas and all that.

Q6600 hands down

The E8400 is a nice processor, but I would still take the Q6600 over it any day. Even though 65nm, it beats out the E8400 even with a mild overclocking. Dual cores aren't "better" for gaming; I don't know who came up with that theory. More games nowadays just take advantage of two cores but if you have a quad it's not gonna make a difference. The Q6600 (G0) is still one of the best processors around and it's well worth the extra cash if you have it. I have yet to see this revision fail to reach ~3Ghz with little vcore added... it's a great processor.

8400, smaller die, higher o'c, and it does better for games. What benchmarks have you been looking at? 3ghz with little vcore added? 8400 hit 4ghz with 1.37volts. Q6600 hit 3.5 with around 1.45

The poll's at 50/50, now we're getting somewhere. LOL

has anyone found a cheap deal for q6600, canadian deals would be nice

go to newegg.ca i think its there for 218 or something like that.

At Last....

The voice of reason!

I always find that most q6600 owners are biased towards the core 2's. But numbers dont lie once you start testing these things.

An Elegant Solution......

Given all the writing, debating, anguish, uncertainty, and eventual second guessing one's self, that usually occurs during this (almost) exact thread that occurs frequently here at TS, LNCPapa has generated a solution elegant in it's simplicity. Simply build a machine for each of the CPUs.

Put a end to frustration and doubt! Treat yourself to a box for each, you'll be glad you did. Game on one while the other is rendering HD Video. Here in the colonies we've already moved beyond the two car, two television frontier, two high end computer systems should be the next logical paradigm...!

Yo Smash, you should know this, you've already done it. Well, fess up. LOL

The E8400 will absolutely slaughter the Q6600.. They're not even close.

I actually put a Q9450 up against an E8400 in the exact same rig.. The E8400 blew it away in pretty much everything I threw at it (games, games and more games).

Q6600 is old school.. And most apps right now don't even use two of the cores... Don't bother with it.

Tis true. Its a learning experience

LOL @ the idea of the E8400 "slaughtering" anything. They are more close than you think. As far as your little comparison goes... do you have the benchmarks to prove that? While it's true that the E8400 can handle amazing overclocks, it only holds a few advantages over the Q6600 in terms of gaming. I don't see the point of building two separate systems when you can just drop in a quad and have great performance all around. You're just throwing money away. I think it's funny how all you dual-core guys think the Q6600 is "old school." Yea 65nm... so what? It's easily the best quad-core processor for under $200 and the G0 holds unbelievable overclocking capabilities.

Actually I ran them both stock, and the E8400 even beat it at 3dmark (in terms of overall score, albeit the CPU score was higher on the quad because 3dmark can use all four cores).

Q6600 is an old tank. Move on. Besides, there's almost nothing out there software-wise that can use all four cores anyways. Even when the Q6600 came out it was a waste of money. Viva 45 nm!!

BTW, I ripped out the Q9450 and sold it. I put my E8400 back in and I've been happy ever since. Totally not impressed.

I will "move on" when a decent 45nm quad is released (Q8200 is a joke). For now, I'm gonna wrap up my input with this lousy thread (which has been covered a million times btw) and keep my Q6600 in it's socket... unused cores and all

There have been talks about this previously. A member of ours is stuck in between two different cpus. We should probably be objective at least about the tread.

Ok, let's be objective. Good call.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/core2quad-q9300_9.html#sect0

The E8500 eating a Q6600 for breakfast in gaming.

how did it eat it for breakfast =[

I would hate to send you to another website for info on this, but Tom's Hardware has a complete benchmark series comparing the two cpu's in question along with most other cpu's that have come out in the last couple of years. If you look at the gaming benchmarks and the fps scores, you'll see that the 8400 beats the 6600 every time. But, in the processing of videos, encoding and whatnot, and other heavy cpu laden software programs, you'll see that the 6600 is the better of the two. The url to the comparison is here: http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/cpu-charts-2008-q1-2008/compare,369.html?prod[1275]=on&prod[1267]=on