E6850 vs E6750 vs Q6600

[aed]

So, I recently RMA'd an old gfx card that had gone faulty on me, and I picked up a new motherboard and some memory instead of getting a new card back since I had already purchased a new one.

So now I sit here with a motherboard with a 775 socket and 2gb's of memory, but lacking an Intel CPU to slap onto said motherboard.

I'm leaning towards a dual core, since almost all games today don't support quad core and hence you don't really gain much from the extra cores, while the dual cores have a higher clock frequency and thus should perform better in software that doesn't support multiple cores.

So, if you were in my position, what cpu would you pick? And for what reasons?

Keep in mind that waiting for Phenom or some other CPU isn't an option, I already have the motherboard and the memory so I gotta pick up the CPU soon.

Thanks for your input :).

/aed

[Angelie]

I bought the E6750 + mobo combo from Fry's last week for only $200. I didn't want to pay another $100 for the Q6600. If extra change wouldn't hurt you to get the E6850, might as well.

However, considering I'm already happy with the old E6600, I saw very little "oomph" with getting the E6850 since I'm not a big "zomfg OC it to 4 bagillion terahertz!" So I spent the extra money on getting a zalman 9700 over the E6850...

[Aerothas]

Definitely go with the dual-core. As much as I hate Vista's performance with gaming, we gotta accept it at some point and it'll need those multicore CPUs. I also have a slot 775 on my MSI motherboard and I'm savin up to buy one of those 2.6ghz Duos.

[Andaas]

Definitely go with the dual-core. As much as I hate Vista's performance with gaming, we gotta accept it at some point and it'll need those multicore CPUs. I also have a slot 775 on my MSI motherboard and I'm savin up to buy one of those 2.6ghz Duos.

Yeah, multicore isn't the question, it's dual-core vs. quad-core!

[Element]

I've got the dual-core E6700. Have had it for about 1/2 a year, no complaints thus far. Pretty impressed w/ it.

[Eomer]

I'd get the quad core, personally. Not many games take advantage of extra cores right now (pretty much it's Supreme Commander and that's about it), but that's going to change a lot in the next 6-12 months. Plus if you like to do a lot of multitasking and that sort of thing, your computer will be butter smooth.

But really, you can't go wrong with just getting a dual core either.

Oh yeah, and for those even with dual core, you may want to read this thread: http://forums.gaspowered.com/viewtopic.php?t=15556

The tool was created specifically for Supreme Commander, and it makes a HUGE difference in playability. I have no idea what the hell it does, but basically it runs in the background and ensures that the workload is better spread across multiple cores. The SC benches speak for themselves.

However, I briefly played a few other games with it running, and while I didn't do any benching, there's no question that the tool has a very noticeable effect on core utilization. For example with HL2, a game that is definitely not multi-threaded, instead of one core being at 90% and the other at 10%, it was about a 60/40 split. So even on a game that's not multithreaded, it's still spreading things around a lot better.