Q6600 or E8500

The E8500 overclocks much better than a Q6600.

I've seen the E8500 at a stable 4,6 clock. I've haven't seen the Q6600 at more than 3,2 stable.

When games in some distant future will take advantage of quadcores, the Q6600 will sadly be ancient.

So I would get the E8500 and wait with the quadcore.

Q6600 if you are going to overclock.Captain__Tripps

Will I see a big performance boost with the slower 4 cores than with 2 faster cores?TMorss

So I would get the E8500 and wait with the quadcore.

LastIsFirst

Wait for what. Quad core Q6600 makes a difference right now. The newer i7 Quad core would require him to upgrade his motherboard and RAM too. There is no point waiting.

Most games will require minimum dual core. Recommended quad core in 2009.

Take ARMA 2 for example.

http://community.bistudio.com/wiki/ArmA_2

E8500 or the Yorkfield Quadcores (the Q9x00 ones), they're bound to come down in price now that the Core i7's and Phenom II X4's are out. The Q6600 is old news when it comes to Quadcores. Currently in most games, the E8500 destroys the Q6600 except for a couple games. Look up some benchmarks, there are a ton of them out.EXLINK

These benchmarks are misleading they will perform the same at the same FSB and the Q6600 will destroy it with anything that uses 4 threads and at the same FSB, no question Q6600 is the best option and for the same price.

I've seen the E8500 at a stable 4,6 clock. I've haven't seen the Q6600 at more than 3,2 stable.LastIsFirst

Uh..no, the average stable overclock for a G0-rev Q6600 is actually in the ~3.4GHz range (which is what mine's sitting at; air cooling.) That's certainly not a top-end overclock, either..I've seen even higher than that.

The thing is, you just don't need those sorts of clock speeds for many applications; especially not gaming. The one gaming exception I can think of (where you see significant performance increases from overclocking) is PCSX2, which is *extremely* CPU-reliant (and it's the primary reason I've clocked my processor that high, along with the bit of [multithreaded] video/audio encoding/transcoding I do.)

For the average user though: once you hit the ~3.0GHz clock-speed mark, a Core 2 Duo/Quad or i7 will not bottleneck any GPU setup in gaming apps, save for systems with mutli-GPU solutions. Even in those cases of Multi-GPU setups, your framerates are generally so high with that hardware that the CPU bottleneck is simply irrelevant.