Now wondering if i should wait July 22nd and get Q6600 instead of E6600 with 44$ price difference. Is it worth waiting then buy quad core for $44 price difference or just stick with core 2 duo?
Well nothing really uses quad core right now. There may be a handful of games by Christmas but I doubt the performance difference will be that major over dual core. I built my new computer 2 months ago which uses an E6600 and I overclocked it to 3.2ghz.
If you don't plan on upgrading your processor/motherboard for 2 years then I'd say go for it. I went with the E6600 so that I'd be able to play the latest games because I'd been using an Athlon XP 2800+ since late 2002. This E6600 runs all of the latest games just fine. I went sort of cheap with this computer unlike the computer I built back in 2002 since I plan on upgrading my computer sooner than 5 years this time around.
No games really push the E6600 yet - hell, how many games make use of the two cores? Let alone 4 cores. Most games run off one core and I believe one core on the E6600 or Q6600 is about as powerful? So for a game running on one core you won't even find a difference.
Supreme Commander will use all 4 cores and there are some other upcoming titles that will utilise 2 and more cores. Windows Vista should benefit from quad core, even in Intel's currently hobbled implementation (2 cores talk to the other 2 via the chipset, not directly across the CPU die) but this can be overcome with a decent bus overclock. Personally, I use an e6750 because I find it's 1333 quad pumped bus allows better (read : smoother) intercommunication across the bus.
Vista isn't really affected by processor speed much. I'm running Vista 32bit on a Dell Latitude D510 which is a Pentium M 1.7ghz and it runs just as well as XP. (Well I did have to put 2gb of ram in this laptop before Vista ran smooth....512mb was painfull).
For some odd reason it runs Vista better than the Dell D520/D820's based on C2D. (No file transfers taking hours, desktop feels smooth, etc etc) (Haven't tried the latest performance updates for Vista yet).
I run Supreme Commander on my E6600 and the game does everything i need it to do at 1920X1200. I'm not talking about benchmarks and the like. Just playing the game and it runs great.
Hell, I run my FSB @ 1600mhz and memory @ 800mhz when usually FSB is @ 1066. E6600 runs it just fine.
