Eh, unless you're going to be doing stuff like movie editing, you won't really get the jump you're looking for.. Gaming still isn't that heavily CPU dependent, and with innovations like the physics card coming our way (assuming the games are properly coded), your CPU should last even longer..
I'm sorry but I completely disagree. Conroe is not simply bringing a handful of extra FPS to the gaming benchmarks, but more towards 20-50 and even higher above the FX-62. The whole arguement for skimping on the CPU to invest more for the GPU will likely not apply in many cases with the "Core" uArch. A 2.4ghz Conroe is able to tie or exceed a FX-62 in the gaming benchmarks.
Secondly, cache on Conroe is likely to be very different from both AMD's K8 uArch and even the Netburst based designs. While there are no benchmarks (That I know of) as of yet comparing the processor at different FSB's or cache sizes, based off the plethora of balanced and not so balanced benchmarks that are out there I am expecting the L2 cache size to have a noticable impact on performance.
Another way to look at it is to consider this... a processor that can achieve FPS rates 50+ above a FX-62 on the same vid card and same drives and same memory, will very likely be a very data hungry chip. It has to be fed somehow... and it has already been proven that the 4mb cache plays a very large part in helping to hide the increased memory latency from not having an onboard memory controller compared to AMD.
As the CPU mutlipliers are so low, I wouldn't expect the E4200 to OC to well. I would expect that Intel will bin down most of the worst case, yet still running, CPUs to this bin level. If it wasn't for Intel's strict binning standards, I might even say some E4200s might be faulty enough that they might not work at a full 1066FSB speed.
Regardless, I am personally torn between getting the E6600 2.4ghz 4mb part for $316, or waiting until January when I can buy a $999 quad-core Kentsfield, that has two Conroe dies in it, will have an unlocked multiplier, and should already have a high clock speed.
With that line of reasoning though I could wait forever... But my own Northwood is holding up fairly well, so...
Edit: Have a linky to a massive compliation of data on Conroe. I hope I won't get into trouble for linking to THG here... :music:
THG Forum Thread. While much of it is out of date (A0 Steppings), or simply not balanced benchmarks, or are Intel sanctioned black box benchmark bakeoffs... there are some good links there regarding Conroe.
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