QX6700 Availability

savantu said:
Are you satisfied with it ? That's the question! ;)
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Compared to my X2 4800? Definitely. 50% better performance per core, and two more of them to boot, it's great. Paint.NET's performance scales incredibly with more cores.

I couldn't get it to go at 3.46ghz, at up to 1.45v. I didn't try any higher. It failed Prime95 x4 after about 5 seconds at that setting. (I'm running the 64-bit Prime95 btw :))
 
rolo said:
Compared to my X2 4800? Definitely. 50% better performance per core, and two more of them to boot, it's great. Paint.NET's performance scales incredibly with more cores.

I couldn't get it to go at 3.46ghz, at up to 1.45v. I didn't try any higher. It failed Prime95 x4 after about 5 seconds at that setting. (I'm running the 64-bit Prime95 btw :))
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That's a bummer about not hitting 3.46GHz, but honestly, I was only hoping for 3.2GHz anyway. I don't want to push it too hard ;)
 
rolo said:
Yeah I'm not sure if the cooler I got is very good. I got this one: http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16835103001 . I used arctic silver instead of what came with it.

I figured I'd rather get the OEM and save $500, rather than pay $500 for a Intel stock HSF and a sweet "Intel Inside" case sticker.
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Hmmm...I don't see any copper on that heatsink, though the heat pipes are a plus. The Stock Intel HSF may not be the best, but it at least has a nice sized copper core. I was also briefly considering an OEM CPU until I found the deal at Tank Guys, $1119 for a Retail boxed version. Intel case sticker FTW!!! :D

My plan is to try the stock HSF, if it does the job for me at 3.2GHz I'll leave it be, if not, I'll probably go with a Zalman, which is what I'm using now on my P4 3.4E.
 
chrisf6969 said:
you get a $1000 processor why not pony up $50 for a good cooler.

see here for some good coolers: http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1123593

Tuniq tower (not in stock anywhere?), Scythe Infinity, Thermalright Ultra 120, etc.. are on the top of the list.
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Yeah, I know, point well taken. I don't actually like those massively large coolers such as the Tuniq Tower because they are so heavy, and I do travel a bit with my system to LAN parties, I wouldn't want a sudden jolt to rip that thing off my motherboard.

If I decide that I need aftermarket cooling, I'll probably go with this:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16835106069

It's Thermaltake's Blue Orb II. Very much like the Zalman CNPS but with a color scheme that works well with my case (aesthetics count these days).
 
I think the Thermalright Ultra 120 is a good combo of cooling with a 120mm fan, but not outrageously big like the Tuniq tower or Scythe Infinity.

Off topic: but the rumor mill
is saying the
Q6400 will be $600
Q6600 will be $800
QX6700 is $1000 (we already know)

matches up to the FX-7_ pricing, but more than I was expecting for the Q6400.

Oh well :(
 
LOCO LAPTOP said:
3.6Ghz :D didnt try to overclock it more yet.
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Very nice! What voltage, etc.? Which HSF?

Are we going to be having the QX6700 added to the overclocking database thread?
 
chrisf6969 said:
I think the Thermalright Ultra 120 is a good combo of cooling with a 120mm fan, but not outrageously big like the Tuniq tower or Scythe Infinity.

Off topic: but the rumor mill
is saying the
Q6400 will be $600
Q6600 will be $800
QX6700 is $1000 (we already know)

matches up to the FX-7_ pricing, but more than I was expecting for the Q6400.

Oh well :(
Click to expand...

Q6300 ~ $423
Q6400 $599
Q6600 $851
 
savantu said:
Q6300 ~ $423
Q6400 $599
Q6600 $851
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Will the Q6300 still have 2x4Mb (8mb) ?

The ES Q6400 that I've seen CPU-Z's of still had the full "8mb" cache.
 
So who is going to be the first to crack the lid and show us the pics? :eek:
 
chrisf6969 said:
I think the Thermalright Ultra 120 is a good combo of cooling with a 120mm fan, but not outrageously big like the Tuniq tower or Scythe Infinity.

Off topic: but the rumor mill
is saying the
Q6400 will be $600
Q6600 will be $800
QX6700 is $1000 (we already know)

matches up to the FX-7_ pricing, but more than I was expecting for the Q6400.

Oh well :(
Click to expand...

Looks like I think I am going to bypass the E's and get a Q. I bet we will see Q6400 ~$300 a year from now. :D By then, a lot of Mobo and Bios revisions will be done, and we will see faster / cheaper ram. WTF is AMD cooking besides the goofy dual dual core solution?
 
swetmore said:
So who is going to be the first to crack the lid and show us the pics? :eek:
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Take off the heat spreader? Oh heck no, not me. Last time I tried that I ruined a S754 A64 2800+. Luckily that was only a $150 mistake :)

Anyway, I'm off to Fry's to find a decent cooler ... the little red LED near the CPU on the Intel D975XBX2 motherboard was going crazy after enough Prime95, which indicates throttling due to thermals. I just can't have that.
 
My QX6700 arrived a day early!!!

Here it is, along with a tube of Arctic Silver taped to the front:
QX6700-Box.jpg


And here is a view of the chip from the window at the top of the box:
QX6700-Chip.jpg


My case and power supply don't arrive until Thursday, so this is going to be my paper weight until then :rolleyes:
 
I figured while I'm taking pictures, I might as well show all the parts I've got for this new system.

Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6
CPU: Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700
Video Card: XFX 8800GTX
RAM: Corsair XMS Pro Twin2X 2048-6400
HDD: 2x WD SE16 500GB SATAII
DVD: NEC 7170 DVD+/R/RW/DL/DVD-RAM
Heatsink: Thermaltake Blue Orb II

Just waiting on the case (Lian-Li PC7 Plus II) and power supply (Thermaltake 750W Toughpower) which should be here Thursday.

QX6700-AllParts.jpg
 
rolo said:
Very nice! What voltage, etc.? Which HSF?

Are we going to be having the QX6700 added to the overclocking database thread?
Click to expand...

now im at 3.8Ghz at 1.5V on watercooling :D
 
JethroXP said:
I figured while I'm taking pictures, I might as well show all the parts I've got for this new system.

Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6
CPU: Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700
Video Card: XFX 8800GTX
RAM: Corsair XMS Pro Twin2X 2048-6400
HDD: 2x WD SE16 500GB SATAII
DVD: NEC 7170 DVD+/R/RW/DL/DVD-RAM
Heatsink: Thermaltake Blue Orb II

Just waiting on the case (Lian-Li PC7 Plus II) and power supply (Thermaltake 750W Toughpower) which should be here Thursday.

http://jethroxp.shackspace.com/forum/QX6700-AllParts.jpg[/QUOTE]


Thats sad.. All that stuff, with a crappy heatsink, a crappy power supply, and only 2 gigs of ram..

Otherwise, looking nice.. Not a big fan of gigabyte mobo's though..
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Oh? And what would your suggestions be?

I see from your sig that you have a Zalman CNPS 9500. I considered one of those, but after looking through many Heatsink reviews that included head-to-head comparisons of the CNPS 9500 to the Blue Orb II, I found that the Blue Orb came out cooler and quieter in every test.

I also found that the Toughpower 750W PS has done very well in reviews too, so I'm not sure where your description of "crappy" is coming from.

As for only 2GB of RAM, that's what I currently use in my existing main system and I've never had issues. Once I load Vista on this new machine if I find that 2GB isn't adequate I'll still have two avaialable DIMM Slots to add another 2GB if needed.
 
JethroXP said:
Oh? And what would your suggestions be?

I see from your sig that you have a Zalman CNPS 9500. I considered one of those, but after looking through many Heatsink reviews that included head-to-head comparisons of the CNPS 9500 to the Blue Orb II, I found that the Blue Orb came out cooler and quieter in every test.

I also found that the Toughpower 750W PS has done very well in reviews too, so I'm not sure where your description of "crappy" is coming from.

As for only 2GB of RAM, that's what I currently use in my existing main system and I've never had issues. Once I load Vista on this new machine if I find that 2GB isn't adequate I'll still have two avaialable DIMM Slots to add another 2GB if needed.
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Personally I dont like the 9500 either. Nor the blue orb, nor anything with this kind of design. I would recommend going with something like the Scythe infinity, or Tuniq Tower, as for 4 cores you will need maximum possible cooling. The blue orb is smashed down like that because its designed for use in small form factor cases and home theater computers....

2gb's of RAM. You have 4 processors, each one of those 4 processors needs some amount of RAM in order to feed information to it. I wouldnt recommend running less than 2gb's of RAM on a single core, let alone 4 cores. My minimum recommendation for you is as much as you can get. 4GB's would be optimal, if, of course, XP properly used that much. If you are using XP x64 then 4gb's would work, or linux, or vista, etc..

Thermaltake power supplies.. I've heard nothing but bad things about them.. I prefer, personally, to stick with antec, enermax, pc p&c, etc.. Bigger named companies.. And 750w seems a bit little to be running a quad core, 2 500gb hard drives, and an 8800gtx.. It will probably work, but it just seems so tiny..
 
I was running 2GB in Vista x64 with my X2 4800, and having 4GB with Vista x64 on this QX6700 seems to be a big benefit. The Superfetch stuff really stretches its legs: for instance, I went to go start Word and it loaded instantly because Superfetch had enough memory available to just keep it all cached. Similarly when I went to start a copy of the MSDN Library (not the website) to check out parts of the latest Windows SDK, something which usually takes plenty of time to load in a "cold start" scenario, and it came up instantly.
 
LOCO LAPTOP said:
now im at 3.8Ghz at 1.5V on watercooling :D
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Well dang man, you got a very nice chip then! Mine won't even post at 3.73, let alone 3.46 with much higher voltage. I'm at 1.425v right now, 3.2ghz.
 
Astrogiblet said:
Personally I dont like the 9500 either. Nor the blue orb, nor anything with this kind of design. I would recommend going with something like the Scythe infinity, or Tuniq Tower, as for 4 cores you will need maximum possible cooling. The blue orb is smashed down like that because its designed for use in small form factor cases and home theater computers....

2gb's of RAM. You have 4 processors, each one of those 4 processors needs some amount of RAM in order to feed information to it. I wouldnt recommend running less than 2gb's of RAM on a single core, let alone 4 cores. My minimum recommendation for you is as much as you can get. 4GB's would be optimal, if, of course, XP properly used that much. If you are using XP x64 then 4gb's would work, or linux, or vista, etc..

Thermaltake power supplies.. I've heard nothing but bad things about them.. I prefer, personally, to stick with antec, enermax, pc p&c, etc.. Bigger named companies.. And 750w seems a bit little to be running a quad core, 2 500gb hard drives, and an 8800gtx.. It will probably work, but it just seems so tiny..
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Ok, so I'm trying really hard to *not* sound like a jerk when I say this, but you sound like you really don't know what you are talking about.

Simply having four cores does not mean that the "maximum cooling possible" is necessary. The thermal output of the CPU at load determines that. The QX6700 is rated by Intel to have a maximum thermal load of 130W. I planned on 150W because I do plan to overclock.

The Blue Orb is not "smashed down" nor is it desinged for SFF PCs or HTPCs. It's design is very much based on Zalman's CNPS 7000 and 7700 series coolers which have won rave reviews for years in all sorts of systems. Another benefit of this style of heatsink is that it also provides a lot of cooling for your RAM and PWM capacitors near the CPU.

Each core does *not* require it's own RAM to feed it information. That's why CPUs have L1 and L2 cache, to keep the CPU pipelines filled with instructions. System RAM is just that, for the entire system, it does not get segmented up to individual CPUs.

Thermaltake makes great power supplies, as do Antec and Enermax. I researched quite a few and for my needs, the Thermaltake came out as a top choice. 750W is also by no means "tiny" it's actually a step up from the 650W PS I was originally planning on. All of my parts, at full load, will draw about 490W total. 490W is 75% load on a 650W PS. I wanted to lower the load so that the fan would spin slower and result in a more quiet system. So I opted for a 750W PS instead, where at full system load my PS will be at about 65% load. This also gives me more headroom for future upgrades.

So like I said, I'm not trying to be a jerk, so I apologize if this comes acorss that way. Your last post just really sounded uninformed and I figured I'd explain some of my decisions to help you better understand some of this so that when you are building your next system, you don't piss away more money than you need to on 1000W Power Supplys and such ;)
 
Well you seem a lot more informed on what your buying then I thought. Although I dont agree with some of the things you've said, you sound like you know what your doing.
 
Astrogiblet said:
Well you seem a lot more informed on what your buying then I thought. Although I dont agree with some of the things you've said, you sound like you know what your doing.
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Cool, thanks for not taking that the wrong way. I spent about 2 months researching all of the components for this PC, and I've been building my own PCs for about 10 years now, so I'd like to think that I have a good understanding of how everything works together as a system, in addition to individually :cool:
 
It must be getting close to Christmas. Newegg jumped their price back up to $1599. It was $1199 yesterday. :(
 
Having watched Newegg very closely for the past two months, I've noticed minor price fluctuations on many of their products, but generally never more than a few dollars per week. The price swings with the QX6700 have been crazy, from $1199 up to $1699, sometimes within a day or two. I'd be curious to know what drives that, other than pure supply and demand.
 
JethroXP said:
Having watched Newegg very closely for the past two months, I've noticed minor price fluctuations on many of their products, but generally never more than a few dollars per week. The price swings with the QX6700 have been crazy, from $1199 up to $1699, sometimes within a day or two. I'd be curious to know what drives that, other than pure supply and demand.
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Supply and demand - that's pretty much it. Well, maybe the whim of the retailer too, but they wouldn't price them so high if they weren't selling... and I don't think they'd be selling unless supply <<<< demand.
 
This processor seems to be a waste to me. I'm glad i didn't buy it when i was going to. All reports are that it doesn't o/c as well as the e6x00's, it obviously runs hotter and draws more power, games don't run as well on it, it's absurdly priced, and any game that might take advantage of it has been delayed for at least 6 months. By the time the games and apps come out that can use it, the 2nd gen quad cores will be here and they are sure to use less power and put out less heat. Not to slam anyone's purchase or anything but that's my take on it.
 
Finally got all my stuff together for my next build. Not shown in the picture is my motherboard and heatsink that just arrived a couple of days ago.

compy.jpg


Intel QX6700 (FPO / BATCH L635A693)
Intel Bad Axe 2
Tuniq Tower 120 Heatsink
4 GB of Corsair Dominator 8500 with optional fan
EVGA 8800 GTX
Soundblaster X-FI
Raptor 150 GB
2 x 320 GB Seagate 'Cudas
Other assorted crap

Still trying to decide whether to install my old version of XP 32 on the machine, or the 64 bit OEM version (with free upgrade to 64 bit Vista Business). From what I hear, there are still quite a few applications that don't play nicely with XP64.
 
Wow! That's a pretty penny right there ;) I'll be building my system this weekend too but i went with an e6600 until the games come out.
 
It actually came out to less than I thought it would. Regardless, looking at the benchmarks, the machine should pay for itself fairly quickly as I am going to be using it as my new 3d workstation / rendering box. Should also play a decent game of Quake in the evenings when I'm not working on it.
 
Nice! Congrats on the new system!

And to Astrodave - if you don't have a specific application in mind for the QX6700 I'd agree that it's a waste of money. A friend of mine is building a new system right now too and he was considering the QX6700 as well but I advised him against it. I asked him what he planned to do with it, and he said mostly play CoD2 and other games. I told him to save $700 and get a E6600 instead and overclock it.

I do plan to game with mine, but I didn't buy it because it's the "best" gaming CPU, I bought it because it is the best rendering CPU, and a "strong" gaming CPU. I do plan on overclocking, but I have no intention of going over 3.4GHz, and would be happy with 3.2GHz as well.

Of course, I'm also looking forward to games like Supreme Commander and Alan Wake which have already stated that they will support Quad Cores ;)
 
I got the QX6700 because I do a lot of development work. And plus, a lot of the code I write is multithreaded (http://www.getpaint.net/ -- shameless plug) and posts huge gains on dual and quad-core systems.

And loafer87gt, as for whether or not to install 64-bit ... I say go for it! I went to XP x64 at the beginning of the year and there was a little bit of growing pain for a week or two but after that it's been completely smooth sailing. The more people that install 64-bit, the more that software vendors have to deal with it. It's always fun to be at the cutting edge, especially when you have 4GB RAM and an OS that can properly use it all :)
 
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