When did an overcloked Q6600 beat an overclocked E8400 in crysis?:?

Musa_007

You got the charts right here, didn't you see that the overclocked Q6600 outperformed the overclocked E8500 in almost all cases? But of course, I also said that the difference is marginal...

And no an E8400 at 4.2Ghz is substantially faster than a Q6600 at 3.4Ghz.However the problem is that most games are not that demanding on such powerful CPU's at stock let alone Oced so that's why you wont see much difference between Q6600@3.4 and E8400@4.2.The GPU is going to be the bottleneck with such speeds however there will be some games still which will need alot of CPU power and ofcourse there will be games in the future.

Musa_007

By the time that games will be even more CPU demanging, on that future that you're talking about, games will be utilizing the 4 cores more efficiently because the devs are beginning to focus more on the utilization of the 4 cores. By that time the performance gap between quads and dual will begin to be significantly felt.

Maybe I did not explain myself clearly on my posts. When I compare Q6600 vs E8400, I talk about overclocked comparisons. Those charts at tomshardware.com are non overclocked CPU's. I clearly stated that a non overclocked E8400 is definitely better for gaming purposes if one is not going to overclock a Q6600.

The charts that were posted here are the ones that I talk about, they are all overclocked. Sure an overclocked Q6600 does not outperform an overclocked E8500 on Crysis by much, but is still does... I still need to see the performance between these two overclocked CPU's on a game that only uses two cores. I also clearly stated that in this case, an overclocked E8500 would outperform a Q6600 but only marginally, because, if I'm not wrong, the differences in performance between these two highly overclocked CPU's on dual core games are not much (by highly overclocked I mean 3.6Ghz on quad VS 4-5Ghz on E8400)

I had a bench page showing this point, but I lost it. I'm trying to find it.

[QUOTE="gslaughs"]q6600, you can overclock it easily to 3.2ghz upto 3.6. games are going to be coming out soon that support multiple cores so you would be future proofing yourself right there. plus you can pick up a q6600 for ~$200.Fignewton50

What games are on the horizon that support quad cores? It's going to be a while before we see any sort of standardized support for quads. And where are you seeing Q6600s for $200?

By now, up to what the extent of my knowledge allows me, the games that use the 4 cores are:

Supreme Commander and expansion
Crysis
Hellgate London
Alan Wake )
Unreal Tournament 3

On these great games, a quad will definitely crush any dual core out there. For multithreaded games that only use 2 cores, the explanation that I gave in my last posts still apply.

well, i am deciding between a q6700 or a e8500, i'm not a serious overclocker and just a casual gamer, so whats best for me

nonosniper

If you're just a casual gamer and don't plan to seriously overclock, then definitely go fo a E8400, and no the E8500, since for that, you could save some cash and so some simple overclocking to reach E8500's clocks.

I was recommending a Q6600 over any dual core ONLY if you plan to seriously overclock, since as I said in my last post this thread, a Q6600 @ 3.6Ghz will bash out any dual core in quad core optimized games, and perform almost the same as a E8400 @ 4-5Ghz on only dual core optimized games. (in this case quad cores will only use two cores, that is, 2x3.4Ghz cores while E8400 would have 2x4-5Ghz cores, the difference is 3.6 Vs 4-5 Ghz and I've seen benches backing up that the differences between those two high speeds are marginal. The big performance impact on actual applications usually goes from 2.5 Ghz to 3.8Ghz)

And if you plan on going quad, forget about the Q6700, is a complete waste of money. For that, overclock a Q6600 since they are nicely overclockeable. Heck, I've seen people taking a Q6600 to 4 Ghz.

Vista is future proof, while XP is not. After XP releases SP3, Microsoft will stop supporting XP. XP's lifespan is about to end. All the performance you see on XP will be the best performance you will see for the rest of your life.

With vista instead, Microsoft will continue to fully support it by adding patches, SP's, which will improve its performance, and, with the right hardware, it may begin to perform better that XP did on its end.

So, it's Vista.

Now, if one has at least 4GB of RAM and new hardware, then 64 bit right away. I don't agree with using 32 bit with 4GB since the system wont allocate the 4GB completely, since allocation begins with other memories and then goes to RAM. In other words, it begins to first allocate the VRam, some cache memory and other stuff (I'm not too familiarized with this) So, using 4GB on a 32 bit system will never see the 4GB, maybe 3.5GB at most, So I would vote by using 64 bit with at least 4GB to fully utilize it.

Lastly, I've heard too many times in many forums that Ultimate is the vista version of which has the best characteristics for gaming. I'm still not sure why, but at least this is a deciding factor when I haven't heard of people saying that home premium or else is the best for gaming.

So my personal verdict would be to go for Vista Ultimate 64 bit.

First of all, in the very few games with Quad Core Support, a Q6600 will crush a E8*** right away.

Secondly, on the case with games with only Dual Core support, E8*** will crush Q6600 right away. But this can change if one overclocks the Q6600 to 3.4 or 3.6 Ghz with a good after market cooler. Sure, E8*** can counter attack by being overclocked to 4-5 Ghz, but at higher clock speeds as those, the impact on performance begins to be marginal, just the way 60+ FPS begins to be unnoticeable by the eye.

So, for both cases, I woul go for an overclocked Q6600. For non overclockers, E8*** would be the right choice.

But this is just my opinion.

Ok now that everyone here agrees that this PSU can handle this system at full load, I got a 2nd question:

If I changed the PSU by the Thermaltake ToughPower 850 Watts (100 Watts more) , will my system have better performance? Or 100 Watts more would do nothing to the performance (e.g would 3dMark06 score be the same?)

Thanks.

The PSU is on this link:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817153036

I wonder whether if it can properly handle the following system:

Kingston - Memory - 4 GB ( 2 x 2 GB )
(2x) Geforce 8800GTS Pcie 512MB OC @ 730 SLI
Western Digital WD3200KSRTL Caviar 320 GB SATA 3.5-Inch Hard Drive
7 Case fans
Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeGamer Sound Card
Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 @ 3.4 Ghz
Cooler Master RR-CCH-ANU2-GP Gemin II Dual 120mm Fans CPU & Motherboard Cooler
Securdisk DVD+/-rw Dl 20X Beige with 12X Ram Sw
Nforce 680I Lga 775 Dc MAX-8GB DDR2 Atx 4PCIE 2PCI X-fi Aud Esata

On 100% load for hours, is this PSU an overkill for this system, or will it struggle?

[QUOTE="ket222"]I guess I may go for two X2's in 3-4 months when the prices go down, but I will take everything everyone said into consideration! Bebi_vegeta

Crysis needs more than that.

EDIT: Only if you want to play this game at ultra high DX10 settings and at 1920x1080 res and reach decent FPS.