I'm building a new system for a buddy that for all intents and purposes will be for gaming since excel and web surfing will be blazing fast on either.
My dilema is which processor to recommend? Guru3d.com published their review on the X3 and showed that it was slightly faster than an E8400 on all the games they tested. However Anandtech found the E8400 slightly faster for the games they tested.
Obviously the 8500 will be incrementally faster than the 720 but for this particular user I don't think he will ever OC the Intel chip and when I put this computer together I'm pretty confident I could get a stable 10-15% OC on the 720 just by upping the multiplier and leaving it.
I've been leaning towards the X3 since I think the speeds will come out close to the 8500 if I OC it and we're looking at a $40 savings which when putting together a system for $800 could be used somewhere else (GPU). I just want someone else to verify that I'm not missing something as my desire to tinker with a PII may be pushing me in that direction even if it isn't better for my buddy.
My dilema is which processor to recommend? Guru3d.com published their review on the X3 and showed that it was slightly faster than an E8400 on all the games they tested. However Anandtech found the E8400 slightly faster for the games they tested.
Obviously the 8500 will be incrementally faster than the 720 but for this particular user I don't think he will ever OC the Intel chip and when I put this computer together I'm pretty confident I could get a stable 10-15% OC on the 720 just by upping the multiplier and leaving it.
I've been leaning towards the X3 since I think the speeds will come out close to the 8500 if I OC it and we're looking at a $40 savings which when putting together a system for $800 could be used somewhere else (GPU). I just want someone else to verify that I'm not missing something as my desire to tinker with a PII may be pushing me in that direction even if it isn't better for my buddy.