I am currently earning money to buy and replace my Intel P4 3.0 Ghz (4.4 on Vista Scale). I am looking at around 0.00 to spend but unfortunately there are no CPUs for that price. I wanted it for gaming like Crysis, Bioshock, Call of Duty 4, NFS Pro Street and Assasins Creed. I do the odd bit of extracting files so i was unsure weather or not to get a Quad. My budget is £140 just for the CPU and i so far have came up with an E8400 6mb cache 3.0Ghz. I am getting either the ASUS P5N-E SLI or MSI P6N SLI both support 1333mhz and 45nm, this will be equiped with DDR2 800mhz 2Gb. Just please help me choose the best chip for my purpose.

Whilst Crysis makes (good) use of a quad core cpu, the majority of games won't see any fps benefit.

The E8400, in some benchmarking I'm doing anyway, performs favourably over the Q6600 in everything except multi-threaded apps such as media encoding.

For extracting you'll be fine with a dual, especially a high mhz one such as the 8400.

In your case I'd stick with the dual simply because you're gaming.

Any dual core then or the E8400. I just want the best value and performance, i was considering the E8200 but the i realized it has a 9x multiplier . Could you PM me or tell me weather the extra cache is better and why. thanks

Try to think about it on a bang-for-buck basis. Right now the E8400 is about the best value for money dual core cpu out there. The E8500, for an extra 160mhz of performance at stock speeds, is over 50% more in monetary terms.

The cache will make no noticeable difference when gaming but will allow faster performance in other applications.

The cache is useful in that it stores data that is frequently accessed. So, the larger the cache the more data it can store which in turn will speed up a larger range of processes.