This year I had to make a choice. Stick with intel’s proven and useful Dual Core arcitechure, or move it on up to a quad core… The descision ultimately wasn’t hard.
With the slew of games now supporting multiple cores, but most still shuning anything more than two, and with the core 2 duo’s AMAZING overclocking capabilities, the core 2 quad’s offered little competition. Now, I might regret this the next time I burn a DVD and it takes over an hour to transcode, but when I’m flying through UT 3 with my 4.2Ghz Dual Core processor, I think I’ll forgive myself.
The only Issue then was which model. Processors are notoriously known for having huge price jumps bewteen processor speeds, and I didn’t want to break my budget on one chip. I initially settled on the E8400 as my processor of choice. Featuring low power consuming wolfdale cores and coming stock at 3.oGhz, It seemed like a good bet.
The Intel E8500 Blazing Fast.
However, At the very last second before ordering, I found that the E8500 (wolfdale @ 3.16) was only $20 more. While I typically don’t like to feed manufacure egos, and would rather have gotten the extra .16 through overclocking, I am sure that this purchuse (and liquid cooling) is what enabled me to hit 4.2Ghz.
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