weirdwilli:
People, please remember that this is NOT a gaming CPU, if you primarily want to buy a gaming Processor then C2D Would be a better option, like the equily priced E8400
That's not the whole story. In real-world gaming tests the two processors are about equal at the moment (the E8400 is one or two fps ahead). Tests with the graphics turned down to try and show what will happen when in a few years when games become limited by your old CPU do show the E8400 with a 15% or so advantage, however those tests are performed using current or old games which aren't taking advantage of the extra cores. In three or four years time when your CPU will genuinely be the limiting factor that may have changed and the quad-cores could have 50-75% more performance than the dual-cores.
Then again, it may not have and you've had been better going for the dual-core. You pay your money and you take your choice.
A couple of other thoughts though:
The Q6600 is two dual-cores stuck together.
With the number of cores going up and up (Intel will release the 8-core nehelam at the end of this year) it's possible that the performance of each single core won't be increasing much over the next couple of years. If that does happen then these two processors won't go obsolete for single and dual-core applications for much longer.
