To E8600 or not to E8600

[spacegoogie]

 

Hello all,
I was pointed to this site by user BigPete405. I see a lot of help on this site and think that is fantastic! So I have a question. In my mame cab I have an Q6600 OC to 3.1GHz.
At the time I bought this I was unaware that MAME gets a long best with Core 2 Duo Processors. I have a chance to by an E8600. I know mame does not use the 4 cores. I heard that the ratio of the MHz to mame games vs the MHz on the Core 2 Duo's are like 1 to 1. Over all I have  read that this is the best processor for mame? I have also read that the E8600 will stomp the Q6600? So I came here to ask the ones I believe will know the right answer. Will I see a performance increase?
Thanks guys!!!

[ubiquityman]

Which motherboard do you have?
Not all motherboards will allow upgrading from a Q6600 to a E8600.
The are different generations of CPU.

In terms of performance, if you are comparing 3.1GHz Kensfield to a 3.33GHz Penryn, I'd say the difference is going to be small.  ~20%?
Too small an increment IMHO.
I'd recommend waiting to get a dual core i5 with the turbo mode, even if that means waiting a bit longer.

[mimic]

I always understood that the extra kick came from overclockability of the core 2, rather than the base clock speed. So if your motherboard supports it and and you can easily overclock it to 4Ghz, then you will see much improvement. Isn't there a long thread about that somewhere?

[ubiquityman]

A Q6600 at 3.1 is already reasonably overclocked.  I'm guessing it probably won't overclock too much more.
It's easier to overlock a Dual core than Quadcore.
2x more heat to deal with in a Quadcore

[mimic]

I missed duo in my response.
I meant that core2duo overclocks great and is much less expensive than core2quad