The good old Q6600

M

MrCrispy

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Still IMO one of the best cpu's Intel made. I held off upgrading to i7 last year and SB now mostly because the Q6600 does everything I ask it to with room to spare.
 
Sorry, in my opinion, it has to be the 2600K. $1000 performance for less than $300! That is just insane.
 
The q6600 man, It was the first free performane chip that intel made.

I bet because of it, and the 920, is the reason for the k versions.
 
Same here, I'm still using my Q6600. However if I had the cash, I would upgrade in a heartbeat for video rendering and games (BC2 for example, even thou I no longer play).
 
MrCrispy said:
Still IMO one of the best cpu's Intel made. I held off upgrading to i7 last year and SB now mostly because the Q6600 does everything I ask it to with room to spare.
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Agreed, the E6600 and Q6600 deserve spots in the hall of fame.

dekruyter said:
Nawwwww.the Q9550 is the one to have....:D
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A year later and only marginal performance difference over the kentsfield quads with nearly double the price. The only thing those where good for was the folks that bought conroe and skipped kentsfield. If you already had a kentsfield quad there was no real reason to upgrade, the price just wasnt justified IMO.

I honestly dont get the popularity of the Q9550. All things considered it was pretty underwhelming. If i had to choose between the 2 right now i would go with the Q6600 still because it would be so much cheaper.
 
Still using my q6600, gone through a lot of graphics card upgraddes but I don't think I'm ready to upgrade this now.
 
I just upgraded from a Pentium 4 Prescott to a Q6700. Im enjoying it and plan to until X79 hits. Its nice playing games above sub 20 FPS and doing heavy multitasking without issues.
 
Disposed said:
Agreed, the E6600 and Q6600 deserve spots in the hall of fame.
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I upgraded from the E6600 to 2500K and already miss the E6600. Why? It was such an awesome cpu. Of course it's faster but I also have some other issues with this new build. Besides, the E6600 was snappy enough for pretty much everything except maybe new games?
 
Yeah, but they don't go to 4Ghz+ on air.

Also they launched @ 500.00+. Now days an AMD for less than 100.00 can score better / higher.
 
I upgraded from my Q6600 to a 2500k about a month ago. Honestly, most of the difference I feel is in power consumption and heat dumped into the room. I was debating waiting longer or staying on my "roadmap" and upgrading to SB. My old P5B-E motherboard was purchased in 2006 with a Conroe E6400 originally and I did an ebay upgrade to a Q6600 G0 for less than $40 net a couple of years back.

I've used the core of the Q6600 system to make a second decent rig in the house.

My biggest performance upgrade was going SSD in March 2010. (and it's a big noticeable downgrade when using the Q6600 G0 system which is now HDD based)
 
all are good performers but the problem is the GPU bottleneck
 
Patonb said:
The q6600 man, It was the first free performane chip that intel made.

I bet because of it, and the 920, is the reason for the k versions.
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Not even close to the first. Every generation has a popular chip thatt overclocks like crazy. As someone already said, there was the 300mhz celeron. There was the tualatin celerons that were crazy fast. Northwood c p4s would go well above 3ghz. A couple years ago before Core there was a cheap Pentium D that regularly hit the same clocks as the "extreme edition"

Not that there is anything wrong with a q6600. I am running a kentsfield xeon (q6600 with the multiplier 1 loower) in my htpc and it is a great chip.
 
I had the Celeron 300A and the Q6600 and truthfully the 300A was just a beast. I had mine at 450Mhz which was a 50% increase in clock speed. The Q6600 never did that, not even on water. I doubt anything will come along that will match what the 300A was capable of. If my 2600k did that I'd be looking at 6 Ghz every day.
 
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next-Jin said:
I had the Celeron 300A and the Q6600 and truthfully the 300A was just a beast. I had mine at 450Mhz which was a 75% increase in clock speed. The Q6600 never did that, not even on water. I doubt anything will come along that will match what the 300A was capable of. If my 2600k did that I'd be looking at 6 Ghz every day.
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yeah i think you miss-typed the % increase. the celery 300a was famous for their guaranteed 50% overclock to 450MHz. a 75% increase would be 525 which i think some did do.

yeah i had one, fun times.
 
have to agree with OP, the q6600 has been my favourite cpu.

tho not the guaranteed 50% oc for everyone like the celeron 300a, it was pretty close for most people especially with a high-end cooler or water.

still have mine and it still has lots of grunt at its current clock. not bad for a chip thats over 4 years old and isn't technically a 'true' quad core.
 
I have both and hands down the q6600 takes the crown. It was just a better value and to be quite honest, I hardly even noticed a performance differences. Right now, the q6600 serves up the HTPC @ 3.0 Ghz stock voltages and the q9550 is the production workstation running 3 x 24" eyefinity.
 
aphasia said:
yeah i think you miss-typed the % increase. the celery 300a was famous for their guaranteed 50% overclock to 450MHz. a 75% increase would be 525 which i think some did do.

yeah i had one, fun times.
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Thanks, corrected it.
 
The Q6600 has to be one of the best value-for-money CPUs released in a while. Most of my friends are still rocking them as am I. It isn't the fastest anymore (hardly with i5 and i7 around) but it still gets the job done. I think this is when people really realized the value of very parallel systems (compared to dual or single core). I sure think its "quad-core-ness" is what gives it such long legs--when I first bought mine in 2008 (which was hardly the tip of the early adoption spear) people here were still arguing dual vs. quad. Games weren't so hot on using quads then, but boy am I glad I have it now.
 
next-Jin said:
I had the Celeron 300A and the Q6600 and truthfully the 300A was just a beast. I had mine at 450Mhz which was a 50% increase in clock speed. The Q6600 never did that, not even on water. I doubt anything will come along that will match what the 300A was capable of. If my 2600k did that I'd be looking at 6 Ghz every day.
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The 300a was amazing, I had a Celeron 266 I bought when it first came out. I ran that at 448 Mhz all day long for years. The Celerons were killing the high end PIIs in clock speed for a long time.
 
Monkey God said:
x2 with a BP-6. The good ol' days.
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366's @ 550 on that board for me. Had the 300A get to 464, but didn't have a board with more fsb options to see how much higher it went. Those were quite fun! I think I still have a stick of pc166 sdram laying around somewhere; used it for a 700e that would run SETI@Home 24/7 at 1156 (165fsb - absolutely would not budge any higher).

One of my favorite stories from back then:

I had a small S@H farm that I built with my dad. He was working on one of the celeron systems one day, and for the next week we noticed that system wasn't putting out the WU's it normally did. Pulled it back apart, and noticed that the HSF was only clipped on one side - never reattached. Thing ran OC'd 100% load and didn't fry itself. I don't think that would work with any of my current brood of chips.
 
still rocking my Q6600 @ 3.6 ghz on water :D. I have had this card since release and it hasn't skipped a beat. even at crazy voltages :eek:. its quite fast for my usage.
 
I really want to upgrade to a i5-2500k, but my Q6600 handles everything I throw at it. So I think I might wait for the Ivy bridge.
 
aphasia said:
yeah i think you miss-typed the % increase. the celery 300a was famous for their guaranteed 50% overclock to 450MHz. a 75% increase would be 525 which i think some did do.

yeah i had one, fun times.
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My original Conroe E6400 was 2.1GHz stock and I could flip it to 3.2GHz without doing much of anything. That's >50% increase... I think a lot of overclockers loved the original E6300.
 
next-Jin said:
I had the Celeron 300A and the Q6600 and truthfully the 300A was just a beast. I had mine at 450Mhz which was a 50% increase in clock speed. The Q6600 never did that, not even on water. I doubt anything will come along that will match what the 300A was capable of. If my 2600k did that I'd be looking at 6 Ghz every day.
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Let's keep things in perspective. No disrespect to the 300A, but I'll take the Q6600's percentage overclock with 4 cores over the 300A's 50% overclock on a single core on any CPU OC ranking. The 300A was obsolete far faster. It's just no contest if you remove nostalgia.
 
My sandy is sitting at 5 ghz on air stable, so thats a 1600 mhz overclock w / o turboboost, can do 5.1 as well but keeping it at 5. Sandy 2600k is the new 300A. My 300A was at 464 and its a legend.
 
Managed to sell my Q6600 Rig for just over $700 bucks...(5850 and 8gb RAM too). Not a bad deal if i say so myself. New SB rig ended up clocking in around $1500 so nice upgrade for a net of $800 :D
 
Still using my q6600 @ 3.0ghz on stock volts. Wont be upgrading until, at least, Ivy.
 
When the Q came out, there were debates on every forum about the value of quad core for general purpose computing and esp gaming. While those debates still have some merit, a multi-core cpu is just so much smoother at everything.

I stopped pc gaming when I got an Xbox (and less available time and $$). For most people, an ssd makes a much bigger impact than endlessly upgrading their mobo+cpu+ram. In that respect the Q6600 has really held its own.
 
Monkey God said:
x2 with a BP-6. The good ol' days.
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The 300A was a slot 1 processor and the ABIT BP6 used dual 370 pin sockets which wouldn't use the Coppermine Pentium III processors.

Some of you guys are so young or something. Intel had a lot of great processors long before the Q6600. And most of you that got Q6600's got them long after their second or third major price drops. About half the time it was out, the Q6600 wasn't the bargain it's remembered for. As far as I am concerned the Pentium Pro 200MHz is probably among the best all time CPUs of all time.

Great Intel CPUs:

386 DX
486 DX 50
486 DX2 66
Pentium 100
Pentium 133 (Amazing overclockers aside from the infamous SY039 stepping)
Pentium 166
Pentium 200
Pentium Pro 200 (This is one of the best processors of all time. It was far ahead of its time.)
Pentium II 400MHz
Celeron 300A
Celeron 533MHz
Pentium III 1,333MHz Tualatin
Pentium 4 2.0A Northwood
Pentium 4 3.06GHz "Northwood B"
Pentium 4 2.4C (Amazing overclocker.)
Pentium 4 550 (Also an amazing overclocker)
Pentium D 820 (Cheap and also an amazing overclocker)
Core 2 Duo E6400
Core 2 Duo E6600
Core 2 Quad Q6600
Core 2 Extreme QX9770
Core 2 Extreme QX9775
Core i7 920
Core i7 980X (The first EE processor worth having.)

I'm sure there are more I've forgotten but you guys are missing out on so many more which predated the Q6600 by a decade or more.
 
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TheComputerguy said:
I just upgraded my 6700 to a 9550.

Sweet little speed bump for my HTPC/media server.
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I recently upgraded from a Q6600 to a QX6850 to a Core i7 920 in my HTPC. The QX6850 was to stick around for awhile but I ended up replacing the whole system due to various issues I had and kept having with it.
 
Dan_D said:
The 300A was a slot 1 processor and the ABIT BP6 used dual 370 pin sockets which wouldn't use the Coppermine Pentium III processors.

Some of you guys are so young or something. Intel had a lot of great processors long before the Q6600. And most of you that got Q6600's got them long after their second or third major price drops. About half the time it was out, the Q6600 wasn't the bargain it's remembered for. As far as I am concerned the Pentium Pro 200MHz is probably among the best all time CPUs of all time.

Great Intel CPUs:

386 DX
486 DX 50
486 DX2 66
Pentium 100
Pentium 133 (Amazing overclockers aside from the infamous SY039 stepping)
Pentium 166
Pentium 200
Pentium Pro 200 (This is one of the best processors of all time. It was far ahead of its time.)
Pentium II 400MHz
Celeron 300A
Celeron 533MHz
Pentium III 1,333MHz Tualatin
Pentium 4 2.0A Northwood
Pentium 4 3.06GHz "Northwood B"
Pentium 4 2.4C (Amazing overclocker.)
Pentium 4 550 (Also an amazing overclocker)
Pentium D 820 (Cheap and also an amazing overclocker)
Core 2 Duo E6400
Core 2 Duo E6600
Core 2 Quad Q6600
Core 2 Extreme QX9770
Core 2 Extreme QX9775
Core i7 920
Core i7 980X (The first EE processor worth having.)

I'm sure there are more I've forgotten but you guys are missing out on so many more which predated the Q6600 by a decade or more.
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You list 3 EE processors then say the 980X is the first worth having?

The E6600 and E6300 where the go to chips not the E6400. I do remember the 820 but the only thing good about it was the price. 4GHZ on air was impressive but even at 4GHZ the performance was lacking compared to the conroe and allendale chips.
 
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