E6600 or 1Gb Ram ?

[Oreo]

Ok so i was going to get 2GB ram and a Core 2 Duo e6400.

But with new up and coming games using more an dmore powerfull accurate physics like UT2007,Crysis ect ect a powerfull cpu is required so i was thing of not getting the Extra 1GB Pc5300 ram and getting a E6600 Instead. I can save up £60 if i work hard in a month to afford another gig of ram.

So which do you think i shud do stick to E6400 and 2GB ram of an E6600 with 1GB PC5300Ram and get another 1GB of ram in a month or two.

Im swaying towards the E6600 but am unsure.




Thanks

 

[b1gapl]

Yea go for the e6600 with 1gb and upgrade later. Well the e6400 can overclock easily past the e6600, but the e6600 can go higher.

 

[Oreo]

Ok Thanks.

Is the E6600 much of an improvement over the E6400 ?

What do you reckon my boot up time would be with a E6600 and a 16MB 7200rpm Hard Disk.

I hate waiting 3 minutes for my pc to load ..(i have to at the moment)

 

[King X13]

Kman thats exactly what i did, i was going to get e6400 or e6300 with 2 gigs but i droped it down to a gig to get the e6600, its not that much more money and you get the 4 meg cache and it runs fine on 1 gig.

16mb? i assume you ment 16gig i hope unless you got windows 3.1 lol. you should get a little bit bigger of a hard drive but i would say 15 sec boot time prob less

 

[Phrantic]

3 minutes is reasonable in my opinion...

There's not a lot of gain from E6400 to E6600. You get a higher multiplier and a higher stock speed which means that you don't have to push up your Front Side Bus that far to get the same clock speed... Many boards can get their FSB stable at higher speeds than that though and the cpu will just be bottleneck. Ok so what I'm trying to say is that the higher multiplier doesn't really give a great advantage since you can push your FSB high enough anyway.

If you don't want to overclock then the E6600 is a little better, its cache is twice as large which results in just a slightly noticeable performance boost in games. The difference between the two isn't that great if you've got PC5300 memory, at PC6400 or higher you'd start to see bigger differences.

It may still be worth the money depending on what your priorities are. But I'd get faster RAM so you can overclock more and precede the E6600... One stick of PC6400 RAM and an E6600 and then work your *** off for another stick, that would be pretty cool.

 

[KBlair]

16mb? i assume you ment 16gig i hope unless you got windows 3.1 lol. you should get a little bit bigger of a hard drive but i would say 15 sec boot time prob less

I think he means the hard drive's cache is 16mb.

 

[jonny_uk]

I think he means the hard drive's cache is 16mb.

yeah its not going to be the size of the HDD

 

[Oreo]

Yeh i did mean the Cache lol ... hard drive will be hopefully 250GB western digital caviar. About my priorities erm nothing much excepot homework on word, internet browsing, messeing around on photoshop, and playing ALOT of HIGH END games (when i get my new pc anyway) ..... Maybe i might get a 1GB of PC6400 it'll be 25 quid - 30 quid more but probly worth it, + i can get a 800mhz mobo for 3 quid less than 667mhz for some reason.

 

[King X13]

lol i wasnt even thinkin cache cuz that really doesnt adjust boot time, to noticeably anyways. the rpms would increase boot time more significantly. plus alot of people bring in there pc's still with that ancient 20 gig hard drive and like 120 megs of free space so i thought you mite be one of them lol.

 

[darkop16]

The higher band width would help with overclocking the e6400. If you decide to go e6600, i would just stay with the ram you have now since it will be easier to overclock.

But i personally would just keep the e6400 and get another stick of ddr2 667 or sell your current stick and get some value g.skill ddr2 800 ram (or some xms2 if you get it while it still has a rebate). You probably won't notice a BIG difference between the e6400 and the e6600 if you were to overclock them to the same speed. If decreasing boot time is your goal, i would do what i suggested with selling your current ddr2 667 ram and getting 2gb of ddr2 800 so you can overclock your e6400 more.

Like my boot time is around 30sec (i can't seem to get the bios to stop checking the dvd writers every boot up for some reason even though i took them off the boot list but w/e), and i have my e6600 set to 425x8 which your e6400 can do w/ a good hsf and ddr2 800 ram (my HZ's are overkill for me cause they can get to ddr2 1067(according to anandtech)).

Hope that helps, sry i write a lot i can't seem to help it anymore after writing so many college essays .