I've been offered from a friend either an Intel X3210 or an E6850 for my new/upgraded rig (see Guess who bought an Asus P5K3 DDR3 board) The X3210 is a Xeon quad core, and the E6850 is a Dual Core C2D, but with the new 1333Mhz FSB. I cant decide between the 2, it would be cool to OC the E6850 to 4Ghz, esp with the bigger FSB, but it would be equally cool to have quad core.

Comments? Suggestions?

Cheers,

Roz

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The E6850 will be considerably faster than the X3210 in most situations due to the 866 MHz gap. There are only a few hypothetical situations where you can benefit from the additional 2 cores in the X3210.

It's hard enough to design an application to get good performance out of two cores, let alone four. You may only experience a benefit when loading the system heavily with multiple intensive tasks. This will uncover bottlenecks elsewhere, such as the FSB, memory speed, disk speed etc.

The E6850 is a better overall choice.

Cheers syphus :-)

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