Arctic cooler freezer 7 pro is one of the best performance/value cooler. still lacks a bit when trying to cool extreme overclocks at 3.4Ghz, in a warm day, you'd be looking at 60-70c. well within CPU specification. from 3.2Ghz to 3.4Ghz is usually a large temperature jump, and then to get 3.6Ghz is usually another temperature jump.
That was my philosophy when I built my system, even though I only really use it for gaming. For now it's at 3Ghz, but when that is starting to get too slow I'll pump it up to 3.6ghz to extend it's useful life - I think it'll be a while before a 3.6ghz quad core becomes obsolete, certainly longer than it's dual core equivalent. Nahalem is really pushing multi-core, with top end chips having 8 cores I think we'll start to see more support for multi-threading in the future. That said, when I bought my Q6600, the 45nm Penryn chips where still to hit the shops, so it wasn't hard to choose.
If u plan to use ed software like 3d studio, maya, daz studio, poser and such, the diference is clear in rendering time. You'll see the four blocks of the multi thread rendering in your front instead of the 2 blocks of a dual core. It doesn't double the performance in rendering time, but it's much better. But if u plan to play WoW... Why are u upgrading anyway?
I'm upgrading because my old system constantly restarts (1 per hour). It's so frustrating. A few weeks ago it shut itself off while I was playing and wouldn't power up for 3 weeks. I'm sure it's pretty much fried.
Well considering Intel's new architecture to replace Core2 (Core i7) are all quad cores with two threads per core, buying the Q6600 is a definite future proof investment. That's what I did, running 3.52GHz on air and not looking back. As software and games begin to utilise all 4 cores, the duos will become old tech and will give the quads a longer life. As already mentioned, for video encoding and rendering, these absolutely own even duos clocked over 4GHz!
As others have said, the dual will currently benefit you more in games thanks to its higher clock speed. Note the word current. Most games can't make effective use of four cores now, but when they can, quads will really shine.
I've been wrestling this one over in my head for a while now, at the moment i have an e4500 and i'll be looking to upgrade in the next six months. thing is the more you think it over the more the quads make sense. at the end of the day you're not losing much in terms of speed per core, also i use my pc for so many things that being able to do a few of them in the background whilst playing games is very useful. get the quad, im going to
Bah, i'll be happy with my e8400, and in a few years when it gets nice and slow, just toss my whole pc to my parents and build a new one... Instead of upgrading I just scratch it and start all over lol. It is more expensive this way probably and I don't get full use of the pc, but instead i'll just OC.
The Q6600 is a 65nm Kentsfield (Core) processor where the 8400 is a 45nm Wolfdale (Penryn). Wolfdale is not simpily a die shrink of the 65nm Core microarchitecture so should we be looking beyond the clockspeed and number of cores? Having read a bit about the larger L2 cache, SSE 4.1 instructions and other equally as meaningless (to me) enhancements, I was still no closer to establishing if the Q6600 was really ">" than the E8400. Fortunately for people such as myself, Bindi has done some benchmarking : http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2008/04/07/intel_core_2_duo_e8500_e8400_and_e8200/1 Interestingly enough if you compare performance of the two processors in some reasonably recently released games (Crysis and World in Conflict) the E8400 comes out on top by just under 10% and in the synthetic benchmark PC Mark Vantage x64 the E8400 was ahead by around 6%. Obviously todays game developers don't make full use of a quad processor. So what might happen in the future of gaming should the game developers start to fully utilise 4 cores? The Cinebench xCPU test may give an indication. The Q6600 was ahead of the E8400 by around 27%.
Greetings! Or see what more cores can do for a HD4870X2 performance at 1920*1200: http://www.legionhardware.com/document.php?id=770&p=0
Sorry for hijacking this post but I had to lol at the statement, do you know just hard it is to code stuff just for two cores? trying to sync multiple threads together and then managing the whole affair across two cores? It's a painfully difficult process and at best, in the future your going to see developers making use of an additional core to do the odd bit of processing when required however I seriously doubt anyone will every fully utilise the four cores and the potential number of threads this allows. The OS architecture does not cater for a multi-core multi-threaded environment, a design flaw from the outset. The processor design is inherently limited as well however if intel/amd moved to something like the cell processor technology then maybe we would have a system where multi-core's are meaningless.
