E6400 or E6600

[TriEclipse]

Downgrade to a E6400/E6300 and use the saved money somewhere else.

 

[UT-44]

the E6600 looks alot better in this comparison thing
http://anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2795&p=8

 

[Sora]

If he likes the setup enough I dont think he needs yo downgrade. Its true the increase in performance is minimal but C2D should be in the lead for a while so he might want to get the E6600

 

[TriEclipse]

Overclock, and the E6600 will be left in the dust.

 

[Sora]

Well the reason its so much higher is becuase the frequency is higher. Even with a sucky board and cooling though the E6300 can reach those speeds. The main thing is the cache. In gaming its shown to be very minimal to have the extra 2mb cache. So if its primary for gaming you could very well do exactly that as he stated, downgrade to E6300 and OC to the speeds of an E6600 then use that extra 130 or so for something else. The way I always look at it in gaming is. Is the ammount of FPS gonna be higher or lower becuase of it? For example even if you didint OC (which I highly suggest you do) You would loose lets say 15 FPS maybe on the game for 130 while you could put that 130 into a better crazy card for an increase in maybe 50-60 FPS. Just think smart when building a computer. Thats what I did and my rig that im getting came out pretty **** nice.

 

[UT-44]

Thats why i wana get a E6600 now with RADEON X1950XT cuz next summer i will get a dx10 card for about £150 and windows vista

 

[Sora]

If you upgrade in the next 6 months then I suggest you get the E6600 then and work around there to get a DX 10 card.

Still OC your E6600 a bit though

 

[TriEclipse]

Neither overclocking, nor a faster processor, will show you any improvement in games. It'll just make the processor more future-proof. That, or you can hope that CPUs start to become more important in gaming, which doesn't seem extremely likely with the GPU bottleneck. So spend the saved money from an E6300 on a better videocard or something.

 

[Sora]

UT I've found a great article for you to show that the OC can do. This is when the E6300 and E6400 are OC'd just a little bit. You can reach speeds of 3.4 stable pretty easily with DDR2-800 ram and a nice Fan

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2802&p=4

This shows truly what they can do.