Get a Phenom II x4 965, mine only cost £145, which is only £4 more than a Q8300, and it has a much higher clock speed.
Example: I installed Civ 4 on my new PC, with a stock 965 @ 3.4GHz, and loaded the 'Next War' scenario, which found was very CPU intensive on my laptop (2GHz Core 2 Duo), and...