Ok guys, I've made some research and got some price listing locally, need to ask this though, which processor do you guys recommend? I'm thinking of the Core 2 Quad Q9400 or the Q9550...Or should I go lower and get something like Q8200? Will there be a huge performance drop? It's not just about performance drop as well, I'd really like this cpu to last at least 3 years +.
And if you guys disagree with the 3 quad cores I mentioned above, which core 2 duo can rival them? In terms of price and also performance?
Don't worry about budget, just let me know which is the most value for money.
Oh, how about the Core i7? Locally, they are selling the 920 and it's actually cheaper than the Q9550... but which is better? Is Core i7 worth to get? Are they the definite future of intel processors? But are they worth getting now since they are newly developed? Thanks all.

The E8500 smokes the older quad cores and even the "Extreme" versions if you OC it just a bit. It's easy to get to somewhere around 4GHz if you read some posts and play around a bit. The 780 chipset is death though so you'd have to go 790.

Other than that, I'd go core i7 period. x58 is a stable (it seems) chipset and most boards run both sli and crossfire and are very cheap on the power. Cost for a good x58 mobo and an i7 920 is about $750 or so (with new DDR3). A tad steep but the fsb is gone and the #'s show it besting my oc'd 8500 by about 50%.

Three sticks of 1gb OCZ gold for the x58 chipset mobo are about $80 unless you want more speed, but I think that's quite sufficient to start out with. I'm upgrading to the i7/x58/OCZ next month. I'm still waiting for a bad post about the setup -- none yet.

sparkinark

don't overpay. It's doesn't matter how much you pay, always your processor after couple of month is average... I remember when I bought top shelf video card for $800, do you know how I was mad when I saw this same card for $300 4 months later ...

don't overpay you don't really need it. It's better replace it within a year than overpay