Friday, I'm making an upgrade from a lackluster non-OC E2160 and IGP to either a Q6600 or Q6700 and a EVGA non-OC 9600GT.

I can't overclock because I'm upgrading a OEM Compaq Geforce 7100/nForce 630i chipset. What do you think? non-overclockedwise, Q6600 or Q6700?

Edit: I also have 2GB of PC2-6400 6-6-6-12 RAM on Vista 32bit, Do you recommend a 2x2GB (4GB) for my upgrade?

The clock rate on the Q6700 is about 10% higher than the Q6600. Personally, I wouldn't pay the extra $60 (or so) for that, but it really depends on your needs. Will an extra 10% boost in processor power make a real difference to what you are doing?

With Vista, going from 2GB to 4GB should make for a noticeable difference.

I have 2 plans: Gaming with Source engine games that only use one core, and rendering in Vegas/Capturing MJPEG.

If a game only uses one core, you'd still want that one core to be faster.

The thing is about the ram upgrade, that would bump my total cost to $660 for more ram and $570 without the ram. (I need a better Corsair HX520 PSU too) Do I NEED the extra ram or is it optional?

I'm not running Vista yet (I avoid new versions of Windows until they've been out for awhile), but from what I gather you really do need 4 gigs of memory to get good performance out of a Vista system. That should give you more of a boost in performance than the difference between a Q6600 and Q6700.

BTW, you can get a Q6700 for a lot less than $570. Try Newegg.

I'm not running Vista yet (I avoid new versions of Windows until they've been out for awhile), but from what I gather you really do need 4 gigs of memory to get good performance out of a Vista system. That should give you more of a boost in performance than the difference between a Q6600 and Q6700.

BTW, you can get a Q6700 for a lot less than $570. Try Newegg.

My totals include everything (Q6700, 9600GT, and HX520 alltogether) totaling $570. Add ram and that's $660. I'll ask on Friday about memory again.

Have you purchased your components yet?

I know that the intel 6 series quads are quality parts, but have you looked at the 9 series? The 9450 is a bit more money than the 6600 but has a higher clock speed, more cache and sucks down less power. Also it has SSE4 support which I'm told benefits video encoding tasks - but until I see benchmarks I'm not sold on that one just yet.

My 630i probably doesn't support 45nm chips. It's a Phoenix OEM BIOS so 45nm would be most likely not supported.

I got the upgrades and am happy with the Q6700, Dual-slot 9600GT, Corsair HX520 and Corsair 4GB RAM. I'll get a PCI (not PCI-e) SATA RAID as soon as I can get Cineform.