E8400 vs. Q8200 for gaming

would i be better off buying an e8400 core 2 duo or q8200 quad for gaming? and should i buy an hd4850?

 

For now days for gaming it would be e8400 since games these days only use 2 cores instead of 4 and the e8400 is faster with just 2 cores for gaming.

For the graphics card What games are you going to play and what monitor do you have?

 

i dont have really any games in mind, but i do like to play rpg's,Medal of honor, and COD, i might possibly try crysis since ive heard some things about it.

This is the monitor im using but i do plan to upgrade when i get some more money to an HD

 

If you plan to get a better monitor for games like crysis you are better off getting an hd 4870. For higher resolutions hd 4890 or gtx 275. peace.

 

For that resolution an HD4850 is plenty powerful enough to run all the games you throw at it. The HD4850 is also nice and cheap. The E8400 is currently the more powerful CPU, but the Q8200 is the more future-proof. If you do eventually plan to get a bigger monitor, you should perhaps consider a more powerful GPU like an HD4870 or HD4890.

 

Well i ordered all my parts the other night and im hoping they all work when they get here but it consists of an ASUS P5N-D mobo(only has 4 eggs and only 46% gave 5 eggs mainly due to it dying so im kinda nervice), 2x2gb Corsair 800mhz RAM, E8400, and the hd4850, i also already have a wifi pci card and an Audigy SE pci card,500gb WD hdd,500watt Thermaltake PSU(also only has 4 eggs) and a raidmax tower. But the motherboard is capable of running quad cores so here in the future ill buy one and they should be cheaper.

Also if i ordered everything the 25th around 11 at night,and it still hasnt processed, and ive heard newegg doesnt do crap on saturdays, when should i receive my shipment?I live in Ohio if that helps

 

The P5N-D is a pretty poor motherboard, it uses an nforce chipset which is dire, it will probably fail within 6-12 months.
The rest of the components are fine - The thermaltake 500W PSU is actually only going to be able to deliver 300-350W, but will still be ample for your system.

 

You should have bought Q9550 since it's so cheap nowadays.

 

It's an excellent CPU, but it's still more than the other two CPUs by a significant amount, $50/$60 more in the US, £44/£50 more in the UK.

 

Hah! In Finland it's only about ~20€ more expensive than E8500. I't costs ~200€ at the moment. But also you have to remember that it's a quad core and the expected lifespan is much longer than dual core processors like E8400/E8500. Especially if you overclock.

 

Yes, the E8500, which is much more expensive than the E8400 or Q8200, the two CPUs in question.

 

Again in Finland the price gap between E8400 and E8500 is minimal from 10-30€.

 

Exactly, 30+20 euros is 50 euros, that's a substantial amount of money for a lot of people.

 

This is the thing where people save in the wrong place. Say you could buy a E8400 with 150€ and you get the best dual core ever manufactured. Then there is the Q9550 costing 200€ and the clock is 2,83GHz, compared to E8400 3GHz. Is this a big difference in dual core supporting software? No and you can easily overclock Q9550 to 3GHz if you need/want to. When it's overclocked to 3GHz i't should be as fast as E8400 in dual core supporting software. Maybe even faster. And then there is the quad core supporting software. At least by my thinking 2,83GHz quad core beats 3GHz dual core in quad core supporting software. So i don't see any good reason why still buy a E8400 when with 50€ more you get so much more . If you don't have the money: SAVE

 

I agree, but a lot of people don't currently use ANY software that can make use of more than two cores. For them, saving $50 they could spend on something else is more worthwhile, especially for low budget systems, it really depends on the user.