Hi guys I have a question for you, would a Intel e8600 3.33ghz be enough CPU to run a 295GTX without bottle necking it to much, or would running a QX6580 3.0ghz be better for the card?

What to you guys think, The qx6850 has an unlocked multiplier so it could be overclocked rather easy also.
The Reason im asking is because I came across some interesting CPU benchmarks where there really is only a couple fps difference between e8600 and even the new quads in gaming usually no more then 10 fps.

review: http://www.techspot.com/review/124-inte ... age11.html

what do you guys think? Would the qx6850 still be a better choice?

thanks in advance

quads are meant for multimedia and workstations, not for gaming...the two extra cores are barely if any utilized in current gen games..

you keep tellin yourself that but far as load times ect quads rule so therefore quads rule in gaming.

so what does that mean then, i should get the quad? instead of the e8600, I would appreciate windows running faster as well, I also do a lot of video encoding as well as play games.

I have a 680i chipset Mobo so I'm limited in my options

This is what I know dude. Me & a buddy both playing the same game with identical systems cept I'm runnin an E3110/8600 he's runnin quad by the time I load in he's in a jet & bailing over there flag all the way across the map. so yeah I went quad & notice the difference he's now just getting in the jet takin off when I load in.

loading a internet game doesnt mean his quad had a big part to do with it...maybe his ethernet card is faster...etc...either way, if you do some video encoding...go with the quad...

ok thanks guys that what I was thinking

*cough*bullshit*cough*

Since who uses an ethernet card nowadays anyways? What are they? LOL I proved it was on my own & I stand by it Ethernet cards(LOL) had nothing to do with it.

I'm gonna agree with Tony on the ethernet card. Don't worry about that shit.

Your not going to get the full potential of that card with either cpu with the stock clock settings.

The archeticture of the CPU has alot more to do with the speed.

A E-8400 at 3.0 Ghz and a quad at 3.0Ghz will run at the same speed pretty much. (like said it's in the architecture of the cpu)

With my 4870x2 for example when I was running my Q9550 at stock (2.83Ghz) my frame rate was practically half of what I recieved when I was running it at 4.2 Ghz. So it takes a good overclock for a card to reach it's potential as well.


If I was on a bit of a budget I would go with the 8600. As games do (mostly) utilize 2 cores for now. You should be able to overclock this CPU (unless it's just real bad luck and you get one that only takes a small overclock).

Otherwise if your doing media work then I would grab the ebst of both worlds and get a quad.

As well. Take in account when it comes to PC's with different load times. You have to take in to account the ram, chipset, HDD's, etc.

You won't notice hardly any bottleneck with that combination, and yes more cores make game loading faster, that was one of the first things I learned about multi-core cpu's when they first were in development.

Most multi core CPU's have some sort of overflow. So when a game loads and it requests to load textures and lets say that somehow utilized 100% of Core1, then it sets the affinity of the rest of the loading to the remaining cores.

You'll get plenty bang for your buck with that config, I say don't be afraid to try it. If you overclock, e8000 series CPU's are right up your alley, and they take a good lapping as well.

I agree with top and tony on the points of the CPU's usage. If you're just playing games, there's very few games that benefit performance wise from a Quad core, (GTAIV for example). But if you do alot of video and media editing, or other resource intensive work in you're OS, then Quad core might be a better choice.