RapidFireGT

Well, thats the problem. I'm not quite sure how much I will be multitasking. Maybe running AIM, IRC, Vista Sidebar, anti virus, and firewall while playing Battlefield 2.

With that extent of multitasking in mind, and prime lift of 4-5 years, would you still recommend dual core or quad core?

chessmyantidrug

You shouldn't really compared stock clock speeds, but overclocking headroom instead. You'll top out around 3.2-3.4 GHz on the Q6600 unless you have a really good cooling solution. You'll top out around 3.6-3.8 GHz with the E8400 with similar cooling. The 45nm dual-core proc also uses less energy thanks to the smaller fabricating process and only two cores.

Most any argument will largely be opinion driven. Sadly, I won't be able to give first-hand experience and facts until I get home and assemble my rig in October. I bought an E8400 ($167.70 shipped) and Q6600 ($150 shipped) for a direct comparison test of my own. I'm not going to bother running any CPU benchmarks because the quad will own the dual. I'll only be concerned with in-game performance utilizing WiC's in-game benchmark.

One fact does remain though: the vast majority of games today don't utilize four cores. I'm pretty sure the amount that do can be counted on one hand. Everything I've read says higher-clocked duals will perform better in-game than lower-clocked quads. I'm sure a quad clocked at the same speed would perform slightly better, but you'll need quite a bit of luck to get a Q6600 on par with an overclocked E8400.

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Dark Volker

If you know for sure that you will want to multitask a lot on this sytem, I would almost have to recommend the Q6600 or even a higher end Quad Core. I use the E8400 because I rarely multitask, and when I do I usually don't run multiple applications that use a lot of your CPU resources. When I am gaming I usually don't run more than 2 or 3 other applications in the background, and the ones that I do run don't use up much of the CPU's resources. From reading everything you've posted, I'd probably go with a quad core...but one that is better than the q6600 as far as the L2 Cache and operating freqs.

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