Downgrade from e6600 to e6400?

[sdkoskey]

I've noticed in the For Sale/Trade category that some people have been selling their e6600 CPUs and downgrading to the e6400. Why? Is there some advantage the e6400 has over the 6600? I haven't done a lot of investigating on new processors recently so if this is an obvious question to some of you, please bear with my ignorance.

Thanks.

 

[yiranhu]

Price? Downgrade and overclock the 6400 to 3.2 GHz is a good move...
I would sell 6600 and then wait for 6450 then that would be a real plus...

 

[StopSign]

E6400 seems to overclock a lot better than E6600 in general.

 

[sdkoskey]

That thought had occurred to me but if you can overclock the 6400 to 6600 speeds or even beyond, does that speed increase perform as well as the 6600 with amount of cache you get on the 6600 (4mb per core vs. 2mb on the 6400)?

 

[chizow]

Originally posted by: sdkoskey
That thought had occurred to me but if you can overclock the 6400 to 6600 speeds or even beyond, does that speed increase perform as well as the 6600 with amount of cache you get on the 6600 (4mb per core vs. 2mb on the 6400)?

There's a lot of reviews that compared the 2MB to 4MB cache using the unlocked X6700 and for most users and common apps its only 3-5% difference or so.

If I could do it over though I might've gotten an E6600 instead or gotten a better mobo. I can't push the FSB on my mobo higher without after-market cooling so a higher stock multiplier would've helped me achieve a higher OC.

 

[StopSign]

Originally posted by: sdkoskey
That thought had occurred to me but if you can overclock the 6400 to 6600 speeds or even beyond, does that speed increase perform as well as the 6600 with amount of cache you get on the 6600 (4mb per core vs. 2mb on the 6400)?

More cache will not offset a higher clock.

 

[sdkoskey]

Thanks for the replies people. Since I've never been a big OC'er, I guess I'll start thinking about saving money with the 6400 and get into OC'ing a little more, spend more money and get the 6600, or just save the money and get a 6400 and realize that I'd probably never use the full potential of either about 95% of the time anyway.

 

[sanitydc]

Originally posted by: StopSign

Originally posted by: sdkoskey
That thought had occurred to me but if you can overclock the 6400 to 6600 speeds or even beyond, does that speed increase perform as well as the 6600 with amount of cache you get on the 6600 (4mb per core vs. 2mb on the 6400)?

More cache will not offset a higher clock.

yes they do, the additional cache produces more heat, making it harder to cool the higher cached chips.

 

[f4phantom2500]

Originally posted by: sanitydc

Originally posted by: StopSign

Originally posted by: sdkoskey
That thought had occurred to me but if you can overclock the 6400 to 6600 speeds or even beyond, does that speed increase perform as well as the 6600 with amount of cache you get on the 6600 (4mb per core vs. 2mb on the 6400)?

More cache will not offset a higher clock.

yes they do, the additional cache produces more heat, making it harder to cool the higher cached chips.

Yup, also note that it's 4MB total on the 6600 and 2MB total on the 6400, they have a cache that's dynamically shared by the cores. If you are concerned about the 6400's multi being too low, why not just get the E4300? It has the same 9x multiplier as the 6600 and doesn't have the associated extra cache, plus has a relatively low stock FSB of 200 instead of 266 so has a lot of headroom for overclocking, and is significantly cheaper than the E6600. That's my take on it, anyway. It may be only a bit cheaper than the E6300, but you should definitely take into account the fact that if you bumped the 4300's fsb to that of the 6300's stock fsb it would already be ~2.4GHz, so you don't have to worry about whether your RAM and mobo will clock as high as if you got one of the other processors (except those with 9x multipliers or higher, which, again, are much more expensive and have the heat generating cache that gives 3~5% performance increase). The only thing that could keep you down is your cooling (which shouldn't be a big deal even with the stock cooler) or the possibility of getting a dud overclocking processor, which is just as likely, if not more so since they are pushing the same architecture farther, with the higher end processors.


I hope that all made sense, it felt coherent when I typed it.