....at least on Newegg. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] rchInDesc=

The E8500 was $280 yesterday, and the E8400 was $190. As you can see only a dumbass would buy a E8200 or E8400, and apparently these have been priced BY a dumbass. $70 drop on the 8500 but only $10 on the 8400, and nothing on the 8200. The Quads remain the same price all the way down to the Q6600. Im starting to ponder selling my Q6600 for the E8500 despite the loss of 2 cores. Ill make up for it in higher clocks, lower temps and stronger gaming.

Swapping the Q6600 for the E8500 is not necessarily a good move, in fact, its only a good move if all you care about is gaming. ...and then I'd not think that a possible 4-5 fps and choppier multi-tasking is worth it. Na, that's not a smart move. Stick with the Q, unless the fastest possible gaming is all you're concerned with.

EDIT: ...besides, today's gaming is, as you likely know, not CPU bound.

^ perhaps with the newer cards... but no one really knows because there aren't more powerful processors out there

Yea I was just blabbing on about the CPU swap, Im not changing it. However I will when prices come down more, as my Q6600 is a 1.3VID and runs hot as hell. If anything I would get a Q9450.

I love my quad. i will not go back to dual. People keep saying quads are not good for gaming. In my opinion, if you have intel quad core with at least 3 ghz and a good graphic card , you do not need to worry about speed lag over dual core. It is just fallacy that quads are not good for gaming. Cpu ( either dual or quad ) comes second after graphic card in gaming.

The question is... WHERE IS MY Q9650! I WANT MY Q9650!!!

I'm counting the days until the price drop on the Q9550. Anyone know when that's going to be? If Bloomfield is really coming out at the end of Sept., it had better be soon!

+1

Do you think these price cuts or final or there is more trimming to go? The OFFCIAL price cuts are not suppose to start until July 20th (SUNDAY).

Fudzilla said the price cuts would go between July 20th - August 10th. I wonder if it is just a 20 day sale for inventory reduction or if the prices are going to progressively get cheaper on different models during this window of time.

I am surprised that the E7200 Wolfdale did not drop in price.


http://www.fudzilla.com/index.php? [...] &Itemid=66

And what do you plan to do that will stress all four cores to the max while not being I/O bound and is not a benchmark?

Most of the time my second core is not doing much at all I really don't think we need quad core (well except for bragging rights) "lulz mah 4 cores is two more than your dual core!"

One might decide to virtualize using free utilities like VMWare server or Virtual PC, for instance. I recommend that to a lot of my customers that have a contemporary processor and have switched or are thinking about switching to a new OS like Ubunto or Vista. They can try the new OS from the comfort of their existing OS. Virtualizing is much smoother with a quad than it is with a dual. Especially if one should decide to run to multiple virtual OS' simultaneously. When my customers see that they can do this they love it. Virtualization is just one example of where a quad drops a dual.

Say one uses XP and wants to try out Vista but they're not sure if all their software will work properly. If they have sufficient RAM and hard disk space they can install Vista as a virtual machine and use it inside of the activation period. Install their software and learn the OS, etc. etc. If they have a quad core they can even assign two cores to that virtual machine (using VMWare server, freely available) and experience robust performance that surpassed what many experience in hardware-based environments, while everything on the host remains smooth. ...Or, on the other hand If they've upgraded to Vista64 but a few of their favorite packages don't work well in Vista 64 they can run them in a robust XP32/Win2K/Vista32 virtual machine. ...or they can try out Ubunto from within XP or Vista. So many flavors...so many options.

Virtualization, its not just for geeks anymore...just one every-day example of where a quad drops a dual in multi-tasking.

Not to mention the ghz war is about over and the multi-core race is begining. As said a million times, apps are becoming more multithreaded all the time, while some games and most good encoders/transcoders are already setup for 4+ cpu's.

If you want something to max out your CPU cores other than 'pointless' benchmark software then you could do a lot worse than going here http://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/ having a quick read and then signing up.



P.S CPU usage is user definable, I'm only at 50% at the moment.