thinking of upgrading my E6600 to ethier a E6850 or a q6600, i know the quad would sound like the obvious choice but ive seen the E6850 being faster in benchmarks? or should i be looking at the new wolfdales? would my mobo be compatible with those?

I'd wait for the Q9450 if i were you.

Will you be overclocking? Keeping the CPU for a while? What sort of games do you play?

I'd take the Quad though.

HI Andy

What are you using your PC for because I dont really think you will gain much by upgrading your CPU especially if you are mainly gaming as most games are GFX limited. If you can post some usage patterns for your PC I can give you a better answer though. I would either spend the money on something else which will give you greater benefit or just wait longer as CPU prices are always falling. However if you are doing a lot of rendering or encoding etc a quad will certainly provide more performance than a dual core.

The CPU you have got is pretty damn good and will overclock very easily to at least 3GHz if you are into that sort of thing. The 1066MHz bus that your chip uses is also useful for this purpose imo.

bolders

i play fps games mostly, cod 4 ect. how much will that q9450 cost? im mainly worried about compatiblity with my mobo atm, i know it can run a e6850 or a q6600 but not sure what else?

A quick google and it looks to be around £225, some a little higher or lower.

Q9450 should be had for the same price as the Q6600 once the price gouging stops, although imo it'll be £190 for quite some time.

Not sure if it'll work in your mobo though.

if you're going for the E6850, isn't the E6750 the excact same thing but 300Mhz less?

I was thinking of doing exactly the same thing (same cpu atm, and same new cpu choices). Tbh I'm leaning towards the quad, as it shouldn't be hard to overclock it to the dual core speeds anyway.

You can go for a Q9450, but as far as I know only the nForce 780i boards are compatible.

Not true.

On the Intel side the 650i and 680i boards (sold with 45nm support) dont work with the new QUAD cores, however Dual cores work fine.

The Intel P35, x38 and x48 chipsets work fine with the 45nm CPU's, no idea about the older chipsets (ie 965p and 975x)

My mobo (P5B Deluxe) has had bios updates to support the new 45nm cpus, it uses the 965 chipset.