Here is my dilemma...

i pretty much had my new system planned out.. all that i was waiting for is the next wave of high end video cards to come out (8900GTX or r600)..

anyway, now with the intel price cuts, ive done some re-thinking...i was going to go the e6600 route and overclock it using a thermalright cpu cooler... (was hoping to clock to somewhere around 3.4)

now with the price cuts i am considering getting a quad core cpu instead.
My question is, how do they overclock? i have heard they do run hotter than the core2duos. what kind of speeds can be achieved clocking a quadcore with aircooling?

My primary use for the new system would be gaming and general browsing web etc.. but it would also be used for some gfx applications like photoshop.

so, basically, i am undecided on what to do... i want to be able to take advantage of future games and apps using multiple cores... hence my looking at the quadcores, but at the same time i would like the performance gain of an overclock in games/apps

what do you guys think?

anyone, anyone...bueler.. bueler?

Not many people have quad core chips due to the price at the moment. You can see this thread.

You cant get the FSB as high with a quad, even on the best boards you are limited to about 400MHz tops.

With what you are using your comp for I don't see the quad core really benifiting you atm. But I dunno many people that in there home environment that will take advantage of all 4 cores. Plus you are looking to overclock so think about this:

1. You can get a better FSB speed and a higher CPU clock out of a C2D.
2. Most programs/games out right now hardly take advantage of 2 cores. Why spend the money for those other 2 cores?

Agreed. Anyone know of a list of multithreaded apps that actually will use all the cores in a quad chip? The only one I know of at the moment is x264.exe which has a pretty niche user base.

I <3 x264

Found this.

what r u saying? ofc the quad can benefit him, he wants it for gaming and multicore is the future with about 40% more performance than c2d and thats pretty damn much & the games that support it is coming soon hey we even got supreme commander now that support it and future games is probably all gonna support multicore

well if a 3.2 quadcore cpu isnt enough for you then what is?

i wouldnt myself buy a quad now but when the price cut comes i will for sure. it didnt sound like he wanted 2 buy right now but wait for intel to lower the prices.

The quad might benefit him in how long? 2 months? 6 months? Who really knows. I wouldn't go through the trouble of buying anything more than 2 cores until you are utilizing an application which can take advantage of 4 cores.

Say he waits till the price drops and he gets a quad core. What happens if before he even gets a program that will use all the cores some new core architecture comes and and blows current quad core temps and clock speeds outta the water.

I'm not saying I don't support having the quads, wish I could buy one now myself, but he's asking about it and this is my point of view. I wouldn't purchase one until I know that I will make use of it.

well i know some games already take advantage of it and future games will also so its not true about nothing supports it, but ya u can wait for the 45nm shrink of quad if u want i would buy when the price cut comes tho.

well i was fortunate enough to get a QX6700 at work...
have a EVGA 680i MB and 4 gig of PC6400 5-5-5-15 ram 2x2gig
to top it all off i got the Coolermaster GeminII heatsink and some Noctua NF-S12-1200 fans to cool it...
all in a P180b case.

I haven't started to overclock it yet...
but my boss know i will... he just told me not to cook it hehehe...
i did notice a interesting difference in temperatures though...
with Speedfan i get about 10-15 degrees lower temp then what i would get with Everest... i didn't get much time to play with it yet... I have Vista office 64 installed.... and still dealing with the occasional crashing and reboots...
at least it isn't giving me a BSOD all the time hehehe... but vista issues is a different thread...