People say E7200 is better for gaming, because games are single threaded and you can get a higher OC on the E7200 than the Q6600.
HOWEVER, in practice, this just isnt true:
1./ If you look at benchmarks, once you are over 2Ghz Core 2, its the GPU and not the CPU that is the bottleneck. Many benchmarks show THE SAME frames per second no matter what OC you run. Its GPU limited.
2./ Many games have "loads", and if the load is a compressed asset, like a map, the CPU must uncompress it first. A Q will out-unzip an E in all situations, so your map loads are faster on a Q even if the clocks are a bit slower.
3./ It's going to happen... while you are playing a game, some system "service" will do some housekeeping. Having a Q means NO micro-lag whereas an E might do a little pause-for-thought. How to see this, look at benchmark's MINIMUM frame rates, not average.
4./ More and more games are going multithreaded. If you get a Q you are somewhat futureproofed. With the E, you will get faster SuperPIs, but with multithreaded games, the Q can do more calcs per second.
5./ Tomorrow's architecture is Nehalem. That's 8 cores. A single threaded app is only 5% faster than Core 2 clock for clock. That means games designers MUST program multithread in the future... they wont get more single thread performance on next gen.
6./ Q is a cooler letter than E.
