Best bang for the game

FuriaRi0T

FuriaRi0T

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Out of curisoity, and sheer laziness, what do you all think is the best INTEL for the dollar when it comes down to gaming?

What would the best for the dollar be now, for possible future games (I.E. quad-cores, etc...)
 
My picks:


Core 2 Duo E8400 with E0 stepping.

Quad goes to Q6600 with G0 stepping.
 
"Bang for the dollar" is kinda hard to quantify without a price range, but yes, as you scale upwards - E2180 E8400 Q6600

The E7200 is kinda nice as well.
 
elleana said:
"Bang for the dollar" is kinda hard to quantify without a price range
Click to expand...

Not nessesarily (spelling?), performance per $ would yield the correct answer to the OPs question, however I for one don't want to have to do the flowchart, especially if we factor in overclocking.. ;)
 
elleana said:
"Bang for the dollar" is kinda hard to quantify without a price range, but yes, as you scale upwards - E2180 E8400 Q6600

The E7200 is kinda nice as well.
Click to expand...

Does an OC'd q6600 really deliver better gaming performance than an OC'd e8400? I thought all of thoses 1000's of dual vs quad threads had concluded otherwise.
 
I'd say e7200 if you can find it for cheap or the e2180 for budget. You don't need an ass grinding fast CPU now or later for games, it matters but not by much and certainly not at FPS you can see especially if you're not into 1920*1200 and above resolutions as the GPU will continue to be the bottleneck. This applies to Intel, not so much AMD by a large margin.

http://www.legionhardware.com/document.php?id=770
 
Cheffy said:
Umm yes. Read up on the E2180.
Click to expand...

Sorry Cheffy, gotta agree with ocellaris here.

The E5200 has been overclocked to 4GHz on air, and the 2MB L2 cache helps a lot in games. Its about $20 more than the E2180 but totally worth it IMO.
 
All the overclocks greater than 4GHz that I have seen have used over 1.4 volts. 2MB of L2 will help a lot though. Percentage-wise, it will be greater than the increase from 2 to 3 or from 3 to 6 (on average).

What is an average overclock for a E2180 and about what voltage?

And can someone confirm if the E5200 does not have SSE 4.1?
 
harpoon said:
The E5200 has been overclocked to 4GHz on air, and the 2MB L2 cache helps a lot in games. Its about $20 more than the E2180 but totally worth it IMO.
Click to expand...

I agree too. I have an E2180 in my (low-end) gaming box and I hate it. OC's like the devil but it's a PITA to deal with, and general usage performance sucks. Against my 2MB L2 cache E6400, it needs to be at least 400mhz up on clocks to feel as responsive. It was less money, but I would never buy that low again. Esp. when you get some less-than-stellar RAM into the mix and overclocking becomes less than pleasurable, or you have a temporary boot problem and the mobo 'looses' all your OC settings.

It's like having one of those cars where all the HP and torque is up around 6500rpm. It might look good on paper but in general driving and use it's not going to be fun when you have to push it to the max every single time to get decent performance.

I'm still not drinking the quad-core kool-aid though. My next gaming CPU is an E8400 (already on order).
 
needmorecarnitine said:
All the overclocks greater than 4GHz that I have seen have used over 1.4 volts. 2MB of L2 will help a lot though. Percentage-wise, it will be greater than the increase from 2 to 3 or from 3 to 6 (on average).

What is an average overclock for a E2180 and about what voltage?

And can someone confirm if the E5200 does not have SSE 4.1?
Click to expand...

I've seen a couple of 4GHz overclocks a shade under 1.4V, I've also seen a few struggle to get past 3.5GHz, as always with overclocking YMMV. I don't think it has SSE4.1, at least no CPU-Z screenshot has ever shown it.

The average overclock for an E2180 (from what I've seen anyway) appears to be about 3.0 - 3.2GHz @ 1.35 - 1.4V, although it varies quite a lot, the range appears to be between 2.8 - 3.5GHz, I think a lot depends on the mobo choice as well, since a lot of E2180 users will tend to use budget mobos that don't overclock as well as higher end mobos.
 
I've looked around on the Intel site, but sadly they don't make mention of SSE at all in the list of specs.
However, since it's a 45 nm CPU, my guess is that it's based on the Penryn (I saw mention of it using the Wolfdale core here and there), and it would probably cost them more to take SSE4.1 out than to leave it in.
 
so far I have just posted info but my conditional vote goes to the E5200

Depending on what is on sale. I was waiting for it for about a month and two weeks ago, Fry's had a E7200/ECS mobo combo for $100. 3MB vs 2 and confirmed SSE 4.1. E5200 is new though so I expect it to drop somewhat more, maybe $75 or so at Microcenter when it shows up there. Fry's will probably have a $80 E5200/ECS combo in about a month or so ...

Though no CPU-Z screenshots show it, I also suspect it has sse 4.1

Too much to remove it and likely the current version doesn't recognize it in the E5200 for some reason.
 
E5200
or
E7200

Those are the best budget Intel cpu's out right now. Both do well over 3GHz easy.
 
As its been said before, if your going gaming only, get the best dual core you can buy, (personally a E8500) and a decent air cooler and you should be able to hit around 4.5ghz or 4.6ghz on air.

The only advantage to having a quad core for a gaming rig is if you work with a lot of media or do a lot of multi tasking.

there is no difference in gaming between a dual and quad at the same clock speed/bus speed.
 
harpoon said:
Sorry Cheffy, gotta agree with ocellaris here.

The E5200 has been overclocked to 4GHz on air, and the 2MB L2 cache helps a lot in games. Its about $20 more than the E2180 but totally worth it IMO.
Click to expand...


I'm not disputing that the E5200 is a better CPU and/or bang for the buck. It doesn't mean the e2180 isn't an excellent value for the price. I just take exception with the arbitrary dismissal of my suggestion by ocellaris in an unnecessarily rude manner. :(
 
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