Originally Posted by
Jeremy C
Are you adverse to overclocking? If not, find a q6600 G0 and go to town. Those chips are almost guaranteed to hit 3.0-3.6 without much help, and will cost a lot less than the other q processors you're looking at due to the EOL price bump. My B3 stepping ran at 3.15 stock voltage all day with no issues. Since your board is an x38 chipset it should be able to handle the load of a quad core just fine, and I honestly would never buy a dual core at this point in time. Even if the game itself doesn't utilize all 4 cores, responsiveness going in and out of the game or doing other things while gaming is greatly improved over dual core systems.
For gaming, anything higher than a 460 and you will really need an overclocked quad core to not bottleneck the GPU. Even with a 3.6GHz+ OC'd quad, you're going to be up against the limit of the CPU to handle the information (well, unless you turn up the eye candy enough and have a high enough resolution monitor to tax the card, but that's a different story). I generally put more money into my GPU than I do the rest of the parts as I want all the options to crank up. Most games coming out still use a lot of DX9 (thank you, consoles... fuckers) so you're not really missing much by not having DX11 capability.
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