E6300 or E6500?

Okay, so here's the deal:

As of yesterday, I have a bit over 300 PLN. I want to buy a new CPU, because my old E2160 is getting a bit... old.

E6300 with 2.8GHz costs 280 PLN, while E5400 2.7GHz costs 260 PLN. 20 PLN is roughly 2/5 of my allowance, so it's not a big deal, and I'm getting roughly 100 MHz more out of it.

But E6500 costs 340 PLN with 2.93GHz. It's 60 PLN more, so a bit over my allowance. Is it worth paying almost 20% more for that additional power?

E7400 and later cost over 400 PLN, so it's not even worth talking about them. And they don't even seem to offer more power.

If you don't want to spend the money, you can always do an easy overclock. 200 Mhz overclock ( which is really easy to do, although it depends on your motherboard ).

You won't notice the difference much, but every little bit helps of course
The E8400 etc. may have almost similar clock speeds but they also differ in L2 cache etc; clock speed isn't the only relevant thing. The newer processors are better when it comes to that as well.

If you really want a performance gain I'd save up an extra month and buy a E8400 for some real raw power difference

E8400 costs 650 PLN. More than twice what E6400 costs.

Besides, next year I'm 18 and I'll get a lot of money. Then I will buy something really powerful, maybe an i7 or I'll change CPU to Athlon or something like that.

Right now, I'm willing to buy only E6300 or E6500.

Then just go for the E6300. The performance difference is hardly noticeable. And as mentioned before, a 200 Mhz can easily be done on the stock cooler if you'd still want the same performance

Okay, thanks for the advise. But if E6400 is only 20 PLN more, wouldn't it be even better to get it, then overclock anyway? ;p

That's a possibility as well of course. Go for it