Q6700 or E8400 for a new gaming rig?

Gaid1n

Hi guys, I'm gonna upgrade my aging AMD 3700 and I was gonna go for either an Q6700 or E8400. They're both similar in price and it'll be solely for gaming.
Was gonna go for a
Gigabyte EP45-UD3P mobo,
4 gigs of Corsair XMS2 4GB (2x2GB) DDR2 PC2-8500C5 1066MHz
and an 4870
either http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/specpage.html?GW-48701G
or http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/specpage.html?SAP-48701
Does that seem relatively balanced? The mobo might be a bit overkill
I'd appreciate a bit of feedback.
Thanks

B00MSTICK

The E8400 will outperform it for now anyway. You probably won't see games heavily utilising quads for a while yet.

Although if I had the choice I'd get a Q6600 SLACR, and OC it to hell and back.

Anti

If you plan on running stuff in the background ie multiple apps with duel screen go for a Q6600 and just overclock the nuts off it to be honest. If not get the E8400 and overlock the nuts off that instead

PogMoThoin

Anti wrote: »

If you plan on running stuff in the background ie multiple apps with duel screen go for a Q6600 and just overclock the nuts off it to be honest. If not get the E8400 and overlock the nuts off that instead

:rolleyes: You'd not get a Q6600 anywhere, they've been gone a long time. Q6700 only available now as Intel have stopped making them. Good thing is all Q6700's are G0's

@ OP, Usual question, higher clocked dual or lower clocked quad core............. I'd go with a quad as games will run on any chip better than a 2.4ghz C2D and with a quad You'll have ample processor power for multiple applications open at the same time. I play games with Media Player, Thunderbird, Firefox, Msn, Skype, Rocketdock and sidebar all opened without a slowdown, things like this you can't do with just 2 cores. I've my quad overclocked to 3.2Ghz for the best of both worlds.

B00MSTICK

You can get the Q6600 SLACR on overclockers still, it uses 10W less and is also G0 stepping.

Gaid1n

I could go for a Q6600 but they're £30 more expensive than a Q6700 or E8400 and it appears that the Q6700 overclocks just as well. I wouldn't plan on pushing a 6700 past 3.4Ghz anyway.
Anybody recommend a good cooler? I was just gonna go for a Freezer 7 as they're cheap and cheerful but I'm trying to build as quiet machine as I can, hence the 4870 with non-reference cooler.
Cheers

uberpixie

Gaid1n wrote: »

I could go for a Q6600 but they're £30 more expensive than a Q6700 or E8400 and it appears that the Q6700 overclocks just as well. I wouldn't plan on pushing a 6700 past 3.4Ghz anyway.
Anybody recommend a good cooler? I was just gonna go for a Freezer 7 as they're cheap and cheerful but I'm trying to build as quiet machine as I can, hence the 4870 with non-reference cooler.
Cheers

wouldn't put an artic cooler freezer7 pro on a quad...
(grand cooler for a daul core not a quad though.)

Can't really go wrong with a thermal right ultra extreme 120mm for a quadcore.
http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.aspx?sku=338777 or here
http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/specpage.html?THE-ULT12E

Just strap on a quiet 120mm case fan to it an you are well sorted.

Effluo

In Tomshardware.com they are always doing tests on different builds. You should really check them out!

Their results are always the same....
And they're in favour of the dual-cores.

Saying that however i got a Q6700 quad cores just sound nicer...

B00MSTICK

€163 delivered for a Q6600 SLACR here

Seifer

Effluo wrote: »

In Tomshardware.com they are always doing tests on different builds. You should really check them out!

Their results are always the same....
And they're in favour of the dual-cores.

New article up, How many cores do you need?
Worth a read. Only three games used in the tests, all of which showed a slight improvement when moving from two cores to four. They did set the games up so they would be deliberately bottle-necked by the cpu and not the gpu so it's hard to measure how relevant to real life gaming it is.