To all the Q6600 out there.

I've been running a B3 Q6600@3ghz since shortly after they came out .. (how many years is that?). Been a great chip .. got a Q6600 [email protected] .. and a Q6700@stock .. sold the B3, and traded off the Q6700 and have an i2500k, MSI P67A-G43 w/12Gb DDR3 on the way.. the longevity of the Q6600 has been and still is quite amazing.

Up until my Q6600 B3 purchase .. I always tried to have the latest and greatest in hardware .. but man, that gets freak'n expensive.. being poor white trash and single was one thing .. but being poor white trash with a wife and little girl to take care of is a whole 'nother ball game..

..hopefully my new setup will last me as long as my old DFI P35 w/Q6600 w/8GB DDR2 did ..
 
Mad Lion said:
With a hyper 212+ I've got my Q6600 running at 368x9 for 3.31 ghz. Paired up with my recently acquired 5850, I'm getting 52 avg fps in the Crysis 2 benchmark with everything maxed (no AA), including the high-res texture pack. Nothing amazing, but hey, going from a 4870, this is a huge increase. Not only was I able to use DX11 and the extreme settings, but my avg fps increase was 25%. I don't think the Q6600 is bottlenecking this 5850.
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That is precisely why I'm a bit scared.

While I have no *immediate* plans on going that tall in terms of GPU (I have a Gigabyte HD6770 under consideration, due to MC's post-MIR price of $99.99), considering how much *faster* i5-2500K can run, I'm likely to see similar numbers.

I'm so NOT used to being anywhere near even the middle of the framerate curve.
 
I recently upgraded from my q6600 @3.6 to a 2600K @ 4.6 plus 16gb ram.

I run 5850's in xfire and noticed in new games my gpu's were running around 50-60% usage (CPU bottleneck)

BF3 was very apparent.

Now with the 2600k I am maxing the video cards again and my BF3 fps doubled.

great upgrade.

q6600 is going to my gf's son for his computer :)
 
Currently running my Q6600 equivalent (X3220) stock, sometimes as high as 3.4Ghz. Everything else is in my sig. The thing does everything I need and more for the time being. I may have to get a new motherboard soon, however. The P45 may be on its way out, not entirely clear, it loses CMOS settings occasionally but the battery tests as good. No other issues.
 
I was running a Q6600 in my main rig for a while. It was running at 3.4GHz while I had it there. I upgraded to a Core i7 860 and built an HTPC with the Q6600 which now runs at stock levels. Since I've sold the 860 and moved to a 2600K.
 
silent-circuit said:
Currently running my Q6600 equivalent (X3220) stock, sometimes as high as 3.4Ghz. Everything else is in my sig. The thing does everything I need and more for the time being. I may have to get a new motherboard soon, however. The P45 may be on its way out, not entirely clear, it loses CMOS settings occasionally but the battery tests as good. No other issues.
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That's what happened with mine, I swapped a new battery in, and then randomly it started shutting down. I eventually figured out the bridge heatsink was getting too hot. Rather than mess with it, I just upgraded, finding a P35 board new was going to be too much of a pain.
 
Ranma_Sao said:
That's what happened with mine, I swapped a new battery in, and then randomly it started shutting down. I eventually figured out the bridge heatsink was getting too hot. Rather than mess with it, I just upgraded, finding a P35 board new was going to be too much of a pain.
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yup - same as mine, but holding off until Ivy Bridge if I can
 
I recently upgraded my desktop from an eBay G0 Q6600 in an eBay eVGA 780i SLI FTW with 4x2GB to a forums-purchased D0 i7-920 in a B-stock eVGA x58 SLI with 3x4GB. The Q6600 setup got a GTX-480 a few months ago that carried over to the new setup.

The Q6600 was at 3.0 for a couple years and ramped up to 3.6 in frustration the last couple months before the upgrade. It wasn't "24/7 stable" at 3.6, which I put mostly on the 780i being a challenging chipset. Even at 3.6, my most stressful realtime load (5-7 Eve Online clients) was not able to sustain vsync at 60Hz with 8X AA + 16X AF, lowest graphics settings in game, on the GTX-480. It ran a bursty 40-60FPS at 100% CPU utilization that was visually distracting due to wicked stutter from time sharing. The board/CPU combo was clocked back to stock and upgraded my NAS.

The i7-920 is at a fairly effortless 3.8 (1.3V, 200 BCLK, 19x multi, HT On, Turbo Off) and is 24/7 stable. At 530W the current power supply is a bit of a limit. I haven't had any issues with it, but I really worry about combining heavy GPU and CPU loads, and don't anticipate pushing for 4.0+ on the CPU. At 3.8 I'm able to hit vsync with 8XAA+16AF on at least 5 Eve Online clients, with CPUs 70% idle. That's a pretty incredible improvement at nearly the same CPU clock, with the same GPU. I'm sure it's due to a combination of HT actually being well-suited to this gaming load, the massive increase in memory bandwidth, and other IPC improvements.

Z68 was out of the picture for me due to the PCI-E lane configuration (I use x8 Infiniband and storage controllers) and X79 was slated to be (and is) out of this world expensive, while X58 is tested, stable, and hitting the second hand market in quantity right now.

If you're looking to upgrade a Q6600 rig, you may probably find that a second hand i7-920/X58 setup is both adequate and incredibly cost effective next to Z68 / X79.
 
Q6600 G0 stepping at 3.2ghz. I've had it since 2009 and haven't had a reason to upgrade. Still runs snappy enough for me and I don't do heavy gaming, just some WoW here and there.
 
Having just upgraded from a Q9650 @ 4GHz to a 2700K @ 4.5GHz, I think it's worth it. This thing is twice as fast as my Q9650 in Cinebench and while that doesn't translate directly to gaming performance, it does finally mean that I'm GPU limited again (I wasn't on the Q9650) and when Kepler comes out it will be an actual upgrade.

I've also noticed that media encoding (FLAC, AAC and x264) is just ridiculously fast on the 2700K. I told myself that my Q9650 was plenty fast for what I was doing, and it wasn't BAD honestly, but it was pretty much at hitting the limit of acceptability. It depends on what your other components are (hard drive / video card) and what you do with your computer but I think a Q6600 is a little past the point where it's time for an upgrade.
 
Fendrix said:
Q6600 G0 stepping at 3.2ghz. I've had it since 2009 and haven't had a reason to upgrade. Still runs snappy enough for me and I don't do heavy gaming, just some WoW here and there.
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Funny you say that since WoW will benefit from a CPU upgrade far more than most other games. Many new games are well multi-threaded and run well even on an older quad. WoW isn't one of those games however. It still does almost all of it's processing in a single thread, with some model loading and other minor functions handled by extra threads. The result is that performance in WoW is basically dictated directly by the IPC per core of the CPU you are using. Sandy Bridge is an amazing chip for WoW. This is also the same reason why bulldozer and other AMD quads are so lackluster for WoW - it's all about IPC.
 
Q6600 G0 running @3321 (415x8), 8gb ram since they came out, converting it into a ZFS server... I used to run it at 3.4 but after 6-7 hours of prime95 on all cores sometimes one would error out. I just ordered a 2600k with an SSD for the OS, 16gb ram, 212 evo... I didn't really need to update, but want to run ZFS/openindiana and it gives me an excuse to upgrade. When editing 1080p clips from a canon T2i the q6600 is sometimes sluggish when working with layers, the 2600k OC'd will be a nice performance bump.
 
I've been running a Q6600 G0 for about three and a half years in my main workstation. Finally decided to upgrade today. Just ordered an i7 2700k and an Asus P8Z68 Deluxe/Gen3. Also picked up a Corsair H100. I'm hoping to hit 5ghz.

I've still got Q6600s in my VMware servers.
 
if any of you guys are planning on or already playing BF3 online going from a C2Q anything to a 2500k makes a world of difference in frame rate as long as you have a 560 Ti or better video card. BF3 is what finally made me get rid of my aging Q8200 that was overclocked
 
requiem99 said:
Recently moved from 3.2ghz Q6600 to 2500k. 2600k seems pointless for gamers and is in fact slightly slower in some cases due to hyperthreading. The 2500k, even at stock 3.3ghz, slays Q6600 at 3.2ghz. Clearly faster in gaming.
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Turn offthe I7's HT in bios and you have a faster I5 :D
2 more megs of Cache
 
I've been running a Q6600 overclocked to 3.4GHZ (24/7 prime stable), on an Asus P45 board since 2008. It's been probably the best CPU I've ever owned, though I still love my A64 X2-3800. The whole system is transitioning over to become a HTPC as I just ordered up a 2600k rig last night. Truth be told, if it weren't for the fact the P45 has performance issues in Crossfire, I might have just thrown another 5870 in it and continued to play BF3. As it stand, I just got a Dell U2410 (my first LCD) and anything less then Crossfire/Sli is just not going to cut it for BF3 on Ultra.

I expect my Q6600 to live on as a HTPC for about two more years, and then probably as a guest computer after that. Probably onto my display shelf after that. These CPUs are legend...

Spec wise I'm going from this....

Q6600 OC'ed to 3.4GHZ, 8GB DDR2-800, P45 MOBO, Sound Blaster X-Fi, 300GB Raptor hard drive, Antec P182 case, and an ATI/AMD 5870

to this...

i72600K OC'ed to hopefully at least 4.5 GHZ, 16GB DDR3-1600, Z68 MOBO, Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium HD, Corsair Force GT 240GB SSD, Silverstone FT02 case, and two GeForce 570s in SLi.
 
mattchapman said:
What is it about the Q6600 that makes it so special?
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Longevity .. I have been running one since 2007'ish .. and it's real world performance is still decent even today.. 3ghz is usually a given (and then some) with most of these chips ..

price per performance ratio ..it still kicks butt
 
mattchapman said:
What is it about the Q6600 that makes it so special?
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The CPU when I bought it was less than 1/3rd the price of the Extreme Edition Core 2 Quad, but I could overclock it so that it was just as fast, if not faster. Moreover, as far as gaming, it's held it's own far longer then any other CPU. Take a Pentium 4 Northwood. It was great in its day, but it got out paced pretty quick. Within 3 years, it really wasn't that viable. But 5 years on, a Q6600 overclocked to 3GHZ+, along with a pair of good graphics cards, can run any game out there at smooth resolutions.

Longevity, price, performance, value. It's really just a great CPU.
 
GotNoRice said:
Funny you say that since WoW will benefit from a CPU upgrade far more than most other games. Many new games are well multi-threaded and run well even on an older quad. WoW isn't one of those games however. It still does almost all of it's processing in a single thread, with some model loading and other minor functions handled by extra threads. The result is that performance in WoW is basically dictated directly by the IPC per core of the CPU you are using. Sandy Bridge is an amazing chip for WoW. This is also the same reason why bulldozer and other AMD quads are so lackluster for WoW - it's all about IPC.
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Setting the WoW config file to use more then the now default 3 threads also helps quite a bit.
 
Revenant_Knight said:
The CPU when I bought it was less than 1/3rd the price of the Extreme Edition Core 2 Quad, but I could overclock it so that it was just as fast, if not faster. Moreover, as far as gaming, it's held it's own far longer then any other CPU. Take a Pentium 4 Northwood. It was great in its day, but it got out paced pretty quick. Within 3 years, it really wasn't that viable. But 5 years on, a Q6600 overclocked to 3GHZ+, along with a pair of good graphics cards, can run any game out there at smooth resolutions.

Longevity, price, performance, value. It's really just a great CPU.
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You are wrong on the P4 chips.. they were all pretty much crap. A Pentium D was barely acceptable, and was still slower than my then single core Athlon 64.
 
ha!

I've been thinking about upgrading to a 2600k or something similar, but I really see no point in upgrading. I've been rocking the Q6600 and 8GB of RAM on my p5k deluxe (P35) since August 2007, when the G0 stepping first came out. It's been running great at 3.4 Ghz. Even with the games I play (lately BF3), photo editing, and limited HD video editing (Canon 7D) that I do, it's been more than enough. It never really maxes out unless I'm doing large conversions (and I can wait a few extra seconds-minutes).

I don't see how BF3 benefits (framerate wise) from a newer CPU. It never reaches near 100% cpu utilization. Maybe 50-75% tops. If anything, maybe a couple extra frames, but I doubt it.

The only thing I really miss is the ability to crossfire and USB 3.0 (not that I have any peripherals that have USB 3.0 anyway). I think I'm gonna hold out till Ivy Bridge in the spring!

The only thing I've ever replaced was the graphics card. 2900XT > 3870 > 4870 > 6950 (now)..
 
dr4gon said:
ha!

I've been thinking about upgrading to a 2600k or something similar, but I really see no point in upgrading. I've been rocking the Q6600 and 8GB of RAM on my p5k deluxe (P35) since August 2007, when the G0 stepping first came out. It's been running great at 3.4 Ghz. Even with the games I play (lately BF3), photo editing, and limited HD video editing (Canon 7D) that I do, it's been more than enough. It never really maxes out unless I'm doing large conversions (and I can wait a few extra seconds-minutes).

I don't see how BF3 benefits (framerate wise) from a newer CPU. It never reaches near 100% cpu utilization. Maybe 50-75% tops. If anything, maybe a couple extra frames, but I doubt it.

The only thing I really miss is the ability to crossfire and USB 3.0 (not that I have any peripherals that have USB 3.0 anyway). I think I'm gonna hold out till Ivy Bridge in the spring!

The only thing I've ever replaced was the graphics card. 2900XT > 3870 > 4870 > 6950 (now)..
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you must not be playing BF3 multiplayer in 64 player servers then, give it a shot and tell me you can stay above 60 fps with any graphic settings unless your running a low resolution or something 1920 x 1080 or higher will kill any C2Q, the game relies very much on CPU FPU performance to run smoothly. i saw a massive frame rate increase upgrading from a 2.8ghz core 2 quad to a 2500k even if i was running one 560 Ti without SLI
 
I've still rockin the Q6600 with the P5E board, 4g of mem & a Sapphire 4850 2g. I'm gonna convert it to Win8 server for streaming and backup. I moved it into a HAF 122 case. This will be the base of my server. I started a slow build on a new gaming desktop. These parts are for the gaming rig but are going into the int the HAF case until the MB, CPU purchase. I've added an ASUS HD 6970 Direct CU II, Crucial M4 SSD 128. I also added an OCZ 700 modular pwr supply from Directron for $26. It will stay with the HAf. I picked up a Cosair HX1050 pro silver for the new build. The new build will be in a Thermaltake Level 10GT case.
 
cyclone3d said:
You are wrong on the P4 chips.. they were all pretty much crap. A Pentium D was barely acceptable, and was still slower than my then single core Athlon 64.
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Prescott Pentiums should have been called Pentium 5s not 4s. The P4 chips circa 2002 and 2003 where pretty much king of the roost. Your option back then was was P4 Northwood at 3.2GHZ or a Barton XP3200 ( I think it was 2.5ghz?). It was $600 back then, and when you matched it with a 36GB Raptor, 1GB of Cas 2 DDR, and a ATI 9800 Pro, you had a kick ass Battlefield 1942 / Half-Life 2 rig.

Side note: Is Half Life 2 REALLY that old? Wow.

But you're right about it in a way. The P4C only last about 2 years before A64 showed up. By 2006, a P4C was really, really slow for gaming. Whereas now the Q6600 can still play any game well and it's five years old. That's staying power.
 
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Frito said:
you must not be playing BF3 multiplayer in 64 player servers then, give it a shot and tell me you can stay above 60 fps with any graphic settings unless your running a low resolution or something 1920 x 1080 or higher will kill any C2Q, the game relies very much on CPU FPU performance to run smoothly. i saw a massive frame rate increase upgrading from a 2.8ghz core 2 quad to a 2500k even if i was running one 560 Ti without SLI
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I've heard that the older Core 2's have minimum frame rate issues with multiplayer. Single player it's pretty much a wash. Should be interesting to see what happens when my 2600K arrives. Though I'm also going from a single 5870 to two 570GTXs in SLi.
 
The amd 4400+ was pretty sweet in its day too. When OCd with 4gb of ram it held its own for about just as long as the q6600.
 
Revenant_Knight said:
I've heard that the older Core 2's have minimum frame rate issues with multiplayer. Single player it's pretty much a wash. Should be interesting to see what happens when my 2600K arrives. Though I'm also going from a single 5870 to two 570GTXs in SLi.
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well i will attest to that, single player was ok on my Q8200 overclocked to 2.8 ghz with 1 560 Ti, once i started playing multiplayer however i started to see my wallet empty until i was getting smooth gameplay 100% of the time and that required a 2500k and at least 1 560 Ti but as i had already bought a 2nd 560 Ti and the game ran that much better with it in SLI i ended up keeping the setup and all is well in the world for me :)
 
ok i am running at Q9550 3.61 with a single GTX 570 at 1920x1200 and i can play all games at 60FPS on the highest settings some with 4XFSAA or with none. i.e. skyrim holds 60 FPS 95 percent of the time.

I just dont see it worth it to upgrade unless you have money to blow. I can wait for IVY
 
UnrealCpu said:
ok i am running at Q9550 3.61 with a single GTX 570 at 1920x1200 and i can play all games at 60FPS on the highest settings some with 4XFSAA or with none. i.e. skyrim holds 60 FPS 95 percent of the time.

I just dont see it worth it to upgrade unless you have money to blow. I can wait for IVY
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glad your happy with your C2Q still, but the time is fast approaching that the C2Q's are too slow to keep up with all the latest games and with BF3 in multiplayer is just the first of many to come that ask too much from them in my experience and opinion.
 
How many Q6600 users are on Eyefinity?

My Q6600 @ 3.6 still exists but I've never tried it on Eyefinity. If it's still viable, I might consider selling the i5 2500K system I built in the summer as a project and going back to the Q6600. It seems such a waste to not use it for a decent purpose.
 
Frito said:
glad your happy with your C2Q still, but the time is fast approaching that the C2Q's are too slow to keep up with all the latest games and with BF3 in multiplayer is just the first of many to come that ask too much from them in my experience and opinion.
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i agree, , 2012 games are going to alot to handle. I am looking forward to IVY bridge in 3-4 months
 
Frito said:
you must not be playing BF3 multiplayer in 64 player servers then, give it a shot and tell me you can stay above 60 fps with any graphic settings unless your running a low resolution or something 1920 x 1080 or higher will kill any C2Q, the game relies very much on CPU FPU performance to run smoothly. i saw a massive frame rate increase upgrading from a 2.8ghz core 2 quad to a 2500k even if i was running one 560 Ti without SLI
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Yeah, I play on 64 player large conquest servers. I was playing on 1600x1200. I just got a new 30", so that may be a different story... lol.

Same graphics card setup with a single 560Ti? That seems like that's what is holding you back.
 
dr4gon said:
Yeah, I play on 64 player large conquest servers. I was playing on 1600x1200. I just got a new 30", so that may be a different story... lol.

Same graphics card setup with a single 560Ti? That seems like that's what is holding you back.
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what i was saying is even without running 2 560 Ti's in SLI my frame rates in multiplayer went up considerably after i upgraded my CPU with both of them in SLI its no contest, my pc is 4x faster with SLI on a 2500k in BF3 than it was with my C2Q and SLI. when i was on the C2Q i really didn't think it was the bottleneck because like you said my CPU use never hit 100% but the game just isn't designed to max out CPU's it stops short of doing that in effort to probably keep the system responsive due to how it relies on 2 external programs to run as well.

if you want to know what is hold you back in the game its pretty easy to find out in game
open the console (~)
Render.PerfOverlayVisible 1

like a linux console you can press tab to auto complete or show commands in the console, make it easier to type out in case you forget it or dont have multi monitors.

once you have that running you will see a graph on the bottom left of your screen, yellow is your cpu and green gpu. the higher the line is the WORSE that devices is performing, what the graph and numbers under the graph show is how long it takes your cpu/gpu to render a single frame in milliseconds.

i wish i had taken some screen shots before i upgraded my cpu but i never did unfortunately, i was too busy trying to figure out why i could not get high frame rates with 2 560 Ti's :D
in any event though even with my 2500k at low settings my CPU is still the bottleneck keeping my frame rates from going higher as you can see below.

bf32011-11-1311-37-55-40.jpg
 
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