Intel’s Budget Q8200 Quad-Core Popping Up

Early last month, I posted about upcoming Intel processors that would soon be launched, and that apparently wasn’t going to take too long. Some of the new offerings are now becoming available through various e-tailers, although at a very slow pace. The budget Celeron 450 is also an exception, because I was unable to find it anywhere. I’d expect to see that in stock sometime this month.

The new Quad-Core Q8200 is now finding itself priced at around $229.99, which is $40 more than the Q6600, so the decision-making process is not going to be made easy. The Q6600 is of course Intel’s most-popular 65nm offering, and at 2.4GHz, it delivered the speed and multi-tasking capability that people were after. The Q8200 on the other hand, settles in at 2.33GHz and includes 2x2MB L2 Cache, half of the Q6600.

The decision will fall upon what you actually need. If you are heavily into multimedia work, the extra cache of the Q6600 may prove beneficial, but the Q8200 offers better power efficiency and equally good overclocking ability (I assume, if Intel’s other budget processors are anything to go by). The largest benefit in my opinion would be the added SSE4.1 instruction sets, that will make multimedia decoding/encoding a far quicker process, as long as the encoder can take advantage of it.

Right now, not too many e-tailers are selling the chip, but the three I did find is NewEgg, NCIX and Mwave, all priced around the $230USD mark. NCIX doesn’t seem to be carrying any stock right now, but they are taking orders and will deliver once they become available (est. 5-10 days).

• Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200: NewEgg ($229.99USD)
• Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200: Mwave ($225.00USD)
• Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200: NCIX ($262.18CAN)
• Intel Core 2 Duo E5200: NCIX ($113.19CAN)