Massive Price drops on Core 2 Duo's

[PapaMambo]

NCIX.com just dropped their prices on the Core 2 Duos.. The Q6600 Quad is on right now for less than $700 Canadian! Woo Hoo.

http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=22211&promoid=1058

It's about time.. Also, the E6320 and E6420 are out and are finally shipping - taking advantage of 4 megs of cache now instead of the 2 megs of cache on the E6300 and E6400. I would imagine there'd be quite a performance jump to coincide with the extra cache. Pretty hard to knock a sub $300 CPU that performs that well.

 

[Rob Williams]

$640 for a Q6600? That is a great deal! I notice the Q6700 hasn't gone down in price at all though, I wonder why? The E6600 also went down $110 to sit at $290.

 

[Greg King]

Hell yes.

 

[PapaMambo]

I think maybe the Q6700 might drop shortly.. Intel is probably waiting until the 6x50's debut with the 1333 FSB. The E6700 has dropped in price as well - essentially to the same price that the E6600 occupied last week - not a bad deal - although price wise, the Q6600 seems to have dropped the most - and is probably the much better buy. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see an upsurge in Quad Core builds out there in the next few weeks as people flock to this processor.

The initial reports on the E6420 is pretty promising as well. Overclock's really well, and that added cache really makes a difference. I might actually be able to finally afford to upgrade my 4 year old dinosaur Athlon Xp 2600, and move into the world of Core 2's.. It'll be my first foray over to the dark side that is Intel - gotta say I'm pretty scared - but in a good way.

 

[werty316]

I ordered a E4300 and hopefully the one I get isn't a bad overclocking stepping.

 

[Greg King]

The E4300 is a beautiful chip. I would like to compare it head to head with a Conroe and see how much of a difference the lower front side bus makes. With such a high default multiplier, they have OCing promise without a doubt.

 

[PapaMambo]

Every review I've read about for the E4300 say it's a fantastic overclocker. If you can do without the Virtualization (which seems not to be utilized by all that much anyways), it's a fantastic chip. Running at 800 FSB helps you keep the timings at 1:1 as well.. That's actually the chip I was looking to buy before these price drops happened. Now the E4420 (another excellent overclocker from initial reports), and the E6320 and E6420 are all looking like pretty major contenders (the last 2 because of the added cache which really helps performance wise..)

Hopefully we'll see a corresponding drop in RAM prices or in motherboard prices as well, so I can buy a Striker Extreme and load it up with 4 gigs of DDR2 10000... That'd be sweet - probably not going to happen, but I can dream about it anyways..

 

[werty316]

Actually with a CPU using a 800MHz FSB it would be a 1:2 ratio since the FSB, which is 200Mhz, is quadpumped to 800MHz and if you are using DDR2-800 memory, that would equate to a clock speed of 400Mhz.

E4420??? That new to me. Is it like the E6320/E6420 with the extra cache?

I know there are plans for an E4500 in Q3 2007.

 

[PapaMambo]

Sorry.. My mistake.. E4400.. It's the 6x20 series and the 4400 that just debuted not 4420.. mistake in my typing..