addendum to above - if you have a crossfire motherboard you could get a pair of 4850's... Bit OTT but FAR better than anything else for £200.

Will see.

What do you think would be the best manufacturer? Or does it even matter?
I found an Ati Radeon HD 4850 512MB, PCI-E made by ASUS from my local pc store for £131.

EDIT: Sorry for asking so much, Im kinda dump with these things.
And sorry for hijacking this post.

I'd go for this or this.

Both have aftermarket cooling too. If it was my money....

Ok thanks for your help Pilsy.

No worries PiLsy, A E8500 @3.16ghz is always going to just about top a q6600@3ghz. However youd be pushed to notice the difference in any game out there today. Yes you can always overclock higher but one thing you cant do is 'add more cores'. When mutithreading gets going 4 cores will perform much better than 2. Like I said the q6600 is a much better choice for future proofing.
I guess its one of those things you could argue till your blue in the face, Instant performance vs staying power. But Im quite happy with my choice of processor so will leave it at that Just got mine up to 3.2ghz today with a bit of fiddling.

i must say i love my quad core as well, encoding dvd's whilst playing far cry 2.

I just think that spending £130 today on something now that you cant use properly and consequently isnt as fast as your alternative choice for the same money is a little daft . Especially when you add in that by the time apps can take advantage of the 4 cores youll be using socket 1366 (which is launch in about 2 weeks?) and triple channel DDR3. You cant future proof a pc. In 2 years i can guarantee what you have now will be pants. Get the best you can at the time, dont buy for the future in a field where the technology develops at such a fast pace.

The i920 which is out like i said in 10 days or so will give you 8 processing cores as well as turbo mode (upclocking your loaded cores when you have other cores doing nothing) and is the base model. In 12 months time from now we will be talking about the launch of the 32nm part which will give you 16 to 32 cores running at 3 to 5ghz each (depending on which cpu model you buy). Now tell me your q6600 is future proof!

Apps at the mo can just about handle 2 cpu cores. In 12 months then they will be more multi thread aware, but cpu's will have developed so much in this direction that todays quad and dual cores will have equal performance in these apps - both rubbish no matter what speed theyre clocked at!


Before you start thinking I dont approve of the q6600, 12 months ago that was a cracking cpu. When the dual cores were at 2.4 - 2.67ghz the q6600 was a gem of a chip, its just moved on now with 45nm and 6mb cache per core. Whilst a damn good workhorse cpu it just couldnt call it the choice of champions for gaming and general use at that price. If it was under £100 it'd be a bargain, at £130 - £150 its just too much.

Totally agreed, for the price, for an average gamer that doesn't do lots of very cpu intensive app processing there is absolutely no point in spending money on a quad core. And also as Pilsy said by the time most games properly support multi-cores it will be a dinosaur.

i paid £117 for my quad about 5-6 months back, so i dont feel too bad.