French_Toast wrote:
Well I can get an ASUS M3A78 board for cheap from a friend of mine, so I was going to try and stay with an AMD processor simply because I can get a good deal on the board. If i was going to build the best PC for the money, I'd definitly go the e8400 route... as it seems to be one of the better going. So, if i was going to stay with AMD, would a Dual core 6000+ even be an improvement over mine? would I notice a difference while gaming, or would I have to upgrade to say a 9550 to notice a difference?
I used to be a AMD fan. But Intel blows AMD out of the water now when it comes to all around performance. Don't get me wrong. I still use AMD in my servers to support the competition.
You will notice a INSANE difference in performance to stepping upto a Core2.
On the improvement side. I'm hoping thats a rehtorical question. Yes it is but barely noticeable.
I stress this to so many people who believe AMD are gaming CPUs now. And they just don't listen but i'll try once more. Get a E8400 processor. I guarantee you'll like it. And you can thank me after for the recommendation.
With the Q9550 you will just be burning your money at the moment. I went from a E8400 on one of my machines to a Q9550. The performance in games is miniscule. Until games start using more than 2 threads for cores. It's not worth it for a gamer.
If you buy a E8400 and have a 8800 and above. Buy a aftermarket cooler and Overclock the 8400 to 3.6 and above (being 4.0 Ghz) on a aftermarket cooler IE: Zalman 8500 or above..
This will give you more perfoamnce out of your card being that the CPU is the bottleneck over the GPU now.
Anyhow I hope this helps.
P.S. A good budget board which will overclock well on a E8400 would be a P5K-SE (ASUS). I managed to pull 4.21 Ghz on my 8400 on it. With air cooling.
So to sum it up.
Best bang for buck in perofmance and excellent OCer: E8400
Step up: Q9550 which is not a huge improvement in current games. But neat to have if your into the trend...
Mobo: P5K-SE by Asus. Good with this processor to overclock and all the necessary options to do so.