Hi I have a small problem here, I am about to (finally) build a new PC, but I don't know if I should spend the extra for a Q9450 or stick with the Q6600. I will be gaming and re-encoding DVDs on it so the SSE4 instructions on the Q9450 are a benefit, but is it worth it? Rest of system will have 8800GT 4x1GB DDR2 800 P35 mobo 750GB 7200.11 HDD Vista home premium 64-bit EDIT: Also would the price of the Q9450 come down in the next month or so?
The Q9450 is £220 (on scan.co.uk). I doubt that its going to come down in price for a while as Intel has no competition. It'll be faster than a Q6600 (over twice as much cache), but I don't know if that extra performance is worth £70 more. If you're feeling flash get the Q9450, otherwise get a Q6600.
Are you planning to overclock? If so the Q9450 has a lower multiplier than the Q6600, which means you need a board and ram capable of high FSB, meaning you might need to spend more on those components as well. I'm going for the Q9450, but I recognise that bang for buck its not as good as the Q6600 because the percentage increase in performance is not as much as the percentage increase in price.
price won't come down anytime soon, as ^^^ said. why not wait for benchmark, and see what's the typical overclock of q9450, and also see if SSE4 gets a large enough benefit? if both are good, and with £70, you'll know which one to choose. personally, i think q6600 is good, since penryn is only a die shrink. but i might change my mind once i see overclock results
oaksed is right of course that the Q9450 is faster than a Q6600. Whether or not you feel the speed advantage is worth the £70 is of course, your descision. However, Zargon makes a crucial point that I've been trying to express for some time: Due to the 8x multiplier that the Q9450 uses you'll need a motherboard capable of a pretty high FSB to overclock it. For example, to achieve 3.6Ghz (which is pretty routine for the Q6600) the Q9450 will need an FSB of 450Mhz. That's asking a lot of most P35 boards, without lots of extra volts and potential stability problems. The same 450Mhz would get your Q6600 to 4050Mhz (provided the chip was capable). I think an easy way to sum it up is to say that the Q6600 is still going to be the quad weapon of choice for money concious overclockers, whereas the Q9450 will appear to a more hardcore line (i.e. those with X38 boards and 1000Mhz+ RAM).
iv heard of people saying that the Q6600 will be crap by the time software can make use of all four cores. i believe that to be utter crap! The Q6600 clocked at 3GHz+ will be around for along time. mines overclocked to 3.6GHz, and it throttles back to 2.4GHz at idle and during load it sometimes dosen't need to speed up. come to think about it i have never maxed all four cores on load!
Why don't you look up some benchmarks/reviews of the already released penryn chips to get an idea of the %performance increase specifically for SSE4 type useage. That should help you decide.
Cheers guys, since this will have to last me throughout Uni, I will get the Q6600 as I can overclock it later down the line better than the Q9450 could.
One more thing, which motherboard should I get? Currently the ASUS P5K is looking good for the money link. Any other suggestions? Looking at $200-250NZD, prices from here. I can stretch if needed, but only if its worth it over the ASUS.
god that's expensive! wait, it's NZD, not USD. still, 255NZD for an Abit iP35?? anyway, this Gigabyte P35 DS3R have many good reviews, i think this is worth considering
Cheers, will read the review later. The downside I can see so far is no heat sinks on the PWMs where the P5K has a heat sink on one.
