No Overclocking - q6600 vs q8200

[fcwedd]

I've googled q6600 vs q8200 many times. Each thread that I read ends up turning into an "overclockers" thread by the 3rd post. What I only need to determine is which one will provide me the best gaming performance for entities such as CoDWW and/or any future game.

Here are the newegg prices:

Q6600: $194.99 - free shipping
Q8200: $164.99 - free shipping

I don't overclock and am hoping to obtain the one that will provide me with the most fps possible. I'm on a value budget and really can't spend anymore than 200 on the cpu.

Thanks all!

 

[loneninja]

A simple google of Q8200 benchmark brings up results not forum discussions. Q8200 seems to slightly, and I literally do mean slightly out perform the Q6600. It will also run cooler and consume less power.

 

[fcwedd]

True, however, it seems slightly up and down given whatever app it's running.

 

[papalarge123]

too be honest with u, they are both pretty even in the difference in speeds,

the only difference is that the Q8200 is a Penryn chip and will run cooler and use less power.

when going for games, they are pretty evenly matched, although with the Q6600 having 2x the L2 cashe over the Q8200, u may notice a slight increase in FPS in some games that utilise the more accessible cashe banks.

apart from that i personally would get the Q8200 as this will run cooler and use less power.

 

[jfurterer]

The Q8200 at stock speeds is a better price/performance cpu then the Q6600. However OCing it isn't completely out of the realm of possibility. Overclockers for years have sung the praises of the Q6600 and rightfully so. However with the Q8200 you can perform a slight overclock that may not satisfy the hard core OCers but will give you a big jump in performance. The Q8200 has a core clock speed of 333mhz while the Q6600 is at 200mhz. The advantage here is that the Q8200 can be OCed to a core clock of 400mhz easily for little power consumption increase and this gives you a 1:1 ratio to DDR2-800. When your CPU core clock, FSB and RAM is all running at 400mhz you'll have no bottle-necks between the 3 key components.

However if you can find it in yourself to wait it out a bit the price of the Q8200 will continue to fall. The Q6600 is at the end of it's life span and prices are likely to stabilize where they are now. However the Q8200 will continue to drop in price as Intel phases out it's Core2Duo lines in an effort to make Quad Core cpu's main stream. This means that as the bottom run Quad Core the Q8200 will be in direct competition with the lower end Phenom 2s from AMD and will have to be priced significantly lower then the new Core i7 chips as not to compete with them even in lower budget systems. I'd theorize that the Q8200 will drop ~$10-$20 in the next couple months and settle around $120-$130 before mid-year in order to solidify Intel in the lowest end of the Quad core CPU market.

Yet another possibility is that the Q8xxx series will hang around longer then the Q9xxx series in order to steal some low end market share from low priced AMD processors. However with Core i7 there is little reason to keep the Q9xxx series around since the price brackets between the two are similar and the i7 is clearly the higher performer. This could mean a price drop in Q9xxx series CPUs to get rid of existing stock which would force the Q8xxx series pricing even lower.

That said I believe the Q8200 in a couple months time will be the best price/performance CPU on the market aside from the Core i7 which are clearly in another performance category all together.

Here is a great article going over all the choices you may want to consider when going with a new rig on a low budget.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/core2quad-q9400.html

 

[amdfangirl]

Well, the Q8200 is still in production whilst the Q6600 is being phased out. Combine that with competition from AMD's Am3 el-cheapo CPUs... Q8200 will lower in price and Q6600 will increase in it. It is now up like $15 on Newegg.

 

[pr2thej]

non OC'd the q8200 has a slight edge.

 

[The_Blood_Raven]

Overclocking by the 3rd post... ironic.

Edit: oh and just go with the cheapest, it is that simple.

 

[UCAguy09]

I read some reviews...not sure where but they gave the Q8200 better marks in COD 4 but gave the 6600 better marks in crisis................just what I read.....all i did was google it.

 

[cadder]

Overclocked by the third post? That should tell you something.

IMO if you are asking about which is faster, but you aren't going to overclock, then there is something fundamentally wrong there. Now OTOH if you have a system that doesn't allow you to overclock and you can't replace the mobo, then that's a different story.

 

[godbrother]

For anyone like myself that googled their way to this thread, if the price difference between the 2 CPU's are still the same, go with the Q8200 and overclock it from 2.33Ghz to 2.4Ghz and wallah! You have the same clock speed as the Q6600. The only difference between the 2 is that the Q6600 has double the cache. But the 1333Mhz FSB on the Q83200 vs the 1066FSB on the Q6600 should cover that and balance out both CPU's.

There are many good reviews out their that show that 80% of the time the Q8200 is ahead of the Q6600. The only time the Q8200 falls behind the Q6600 is in intense multi-tasking, and by intense... I mean... REALLY intense multi-tasking. (Photoshop, Encoding, Watching Movies, playing games all at once type intense 😀)

Hope this helps.