e8400 or q9550 from a e6400

Xarick

Golden Member
May 17, 2006
1,199
1
76
I have an e6400 @ 3ghz.
Right now frys has the e8400 / gigabyte board combo for $120
or
the q9550 costs about $215

I will be pushing only as high as 400fsb which would give me and effective rate of 3.4 on the q9550 or 3.6 on the e8400.

Do you think the near $100 premium would be worth it for the q9550 or should I spring for the e8400 at $120.
(there is no microcenter near me)
 

Arkaign

Lifer
Oct 27, 2006
20,736
1,377
126
Going from 6400@3ghz to an E8400 would make almost zero sense. Yeah you get more L2, but meh, not really worth it imho. Q9550 will be a lot longer lifespan as more and more games get ready for multicore, and it has a ton of cache.

You would be shocked, but your used E6400 should make a lot of your $ back on fee bay.
 

LCD123

Member
Sep 29, 2009
90
0
0
Overclock that e6400 of yours some more! Save your $ and overclock!

If you are limited to 400fsb, get the e5200 for it's high multiplier!
 

ReblTeen84

Junior Member
Jul 1, 2001
7
0
0
I picked up the Q9550 today actually, from microcenter...$169, couldn't beat it. Wife is getting my E6550 since we had to replace her PC this week. I can tell a marked difference between the two, so i'd go for the quad.
 

JimmiG

Platinum Member
Feb 24, 2005
2,024
112
106
I would definitely go with a quad at this time. For some types of applications, as well as multi tasking, the extra cores really help. Even in games, more than 2 cores is starting to make sense.

Two vs four cores at the same clock speed:
http://anandtech.com/bench/default.aspx?p=75&p2=62

Notice that even in games, there's a difference...
 

RussianSensation

Elite Member
Sep 5, 2003
19,458
765
126
E8400 @ 3.6ghz is going to be about 25-30% faster or less than E6400 @ 3.0ghz.

The thing is E6400 can usually do 3.4ghz. So I am not entirely sure you squeezed everything out of that chip. My Gigabyte P965-DS3 could do 500FSB x 7 on E6400 with Big Typhoon. So I am not sure why you are having problems clocking it above 3.0ghz. In any case going from 3.0ghz dual to 3.6ghz dual isnt worth it imo.

I say you either overclock that processor to 3.4ghz and hold out until Sandy Bridge, or sell it now and get a Q9550 before it gets discontinued. If the programs you run are not video encoding, distributed computing, then a 3.4ghz dual is still pretty good, unless of course you are playing ArmA2, GTA4