That Dang Gas Attack, cost me money

When I was looking to buy a new CPU, it came down to the three choices mentioned here, the E8400, 8500, or 8600. At the time the E8400 was $169US, and the E8500 was $189US, but the E8600 was $269. $20 for an extra .16Ghz was minimal but the $80 for an extra .16Ghz was a bit too much so I went with the E8500 and have been a happy camper ever since. I don't really care about astronomical fps because IMO it's not necessary. I keep my fps capped at 30. The game looks great (54451), runs great with that setting and no stutter etc.

CJ
 
Siggi said:
Shows the 8400 at $164.90 and the 8600 at $325.41. That's a difference of $160.51.

You reckon that's not a lot? You could buy two 8400s for the price of a single 8600.
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You'll notice there are some other options where the difference is about $50, depends on how you can deal with it. And as I mentioned, in our hobby you always look into your pockets first, but no sence to challenge the ultimate truth that faster CPU = better game experience.
 
Dirk98 said:
...but no sence to challenge the ultimate truth that faster CPU = better game experience.
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To a point that's true, and I agree. But once natural terminal velocity is achieved there's no point polishing more wax over your dropsuit.

Or, how many more frames above 30 do you want? Or need.

To be honest I viewed the 8600 as just an 8400 with 300mhz of OC already applied.

4ghz for £150, bargain. 4.5ghz for £250, not such a bargain. And I wouldn't be happy running at 4.5ghz anyway, and already knew that. There's more than just the CPU involved with an OC, as you found out at 4.5ghz already.
 
Siggi said:
To a point that's true, and I agree. But once natural terminal velocity is achieved there's no point polishing more wax over your dropsuit.

Or, how many more frames above 30 do you want? Or need.

To be honest I viewed the 8600 as just an 8400 with 300mhz of OC already applied.
Click to expand...

If I were upgrading at this point like GG, I would go for E8600 with somewhat better RAM than I have now. And, as I mentioned already, the price difference between E8400 and E8600 cost me less, than you're trying to instill, lol. So I'll replace my 2x2Gb ram sticks shortly and go back to 4.5Ghz, no matter if you can afford extra 150 quid for it or you can not, lol.
 
Just curious, how does the mother board relate to all this.. what are the restrictions?
I have a Gigabyte GA-EP45-DS3R (click) LGA775, North Bridge P45 Exp with a Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 2.4GHZ and 2GB DDR2 800 Patriot Extreme RAM. My video is an EVGA GeForce 8800GTS 320MB

I'm getting very smooth game fps, mostly in the 50-60 range with the two scenery slidders on 3, clouds on 4 and the plane and effects on 5

I wouild like to be able to turn the scenery up higher.. What are the possibilities with this board and it's restrictions?

Would I be better off upping my memory to 4GB, updateing my CPU, or my Video card, or try over clocking? What would have the most effect?

Thanks,
 
rabu said:
Just curious, how does the mother board relate to all this.. what are the restrictions?
I have a Gigabyte GA-EP45-DS3R (click) LGA775, North Bridge P45 Exp with a Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 2.4GHZ and 2GB DDR2 800 Patriot Extreme RAM. My video is an EVGA GeForce 8800GTS 320MB

I'm getting very smooth game fps, mostly in the 50-60 range with the two scenery slidders on 3, clouds on 4 and the plane and effects on 5

I wouild like to be able to turn the scenery up higher.. What are the possibilities with this board and it's restrictions?

Would I be better off upping my memory to 4GB, updateing my CPU, or my Video card, or try over clocking? What would have the most effect?

Thanks,
Click to expand...

I saw a huge improvement going from a 3ghz chip to a 4ghz one. My frames were going down the pan whenever a/c were spawning somewhere, or doing stuff. Not sure what exactly, but it seemed to be tied to AI going from tootling to doing stuff. I attacked a group of 2-seaters and my FPS went from 30-ish to 5-ish soon as I got close to them and the bullets started flying. I've not had anything like that happen since I went to a 4ghz chip.

Your mobo for OC:

"We cracked out the usual Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 and Core 2 Duo E8500 and started to whip up the front side bus. We managed to get a healthy but quite average 465MHz on the quad core, but even after tweaking the GTL reference voltages and clock skews just couldn't quite get it perfectly stable. We suspect our tame PLL and termination voltages of 1.65V and 1.30V were the problem and increasing these would have helped, but don't quite fancy killing the CPU just yet.

We tried with the dual core E8500 next and got the system to boot all the way up at 530MHz but had to dial it right back to 490-495MHz FSB before it would actually boot Windows and achieve stability. We'd have expected at least 500MHz FSB and we know this CPU will do 535MHz stable at least. Even when we pushed the PLL, termination voltages and tried to play with the clock skews (we played around with varying combinations between 0-250PS on the MCH and CPU) but it still didn't like the 500MHz threshold and would reset itself during POST.

Pushing extra voltage through the P45 northbridge on its small heatsink did see the temperature hit around mid-40s with an 80mm fan over the top which is really not that bad, although some might want to consider use of a bigger heatsink.

One thing to note is that Gigabyte's overclock-failure recovery system is again, really quite good. Sometimes the board will cycle itself turning on and off one or two times before resetting itself. It's better than previous Gigabyte boards where it would do this dance several times before coming up with something it likes."

Your CPU has a x9 multiplier, so 444mhz (1780mhz FSB) OC would give you 4ghz, which your mobo will do easily. From a quick look on the net that chip will do around 3.5ghz max safely.
 
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