Q6600

Hey i'm looking at putting together a new rig which is going to be used for studies, My freind has a Intel Q6600 LGA 775 he is willing to depart for £100, Is this chip any good? and worth the price?

Ive noticed on amazon and stuff that this chip is still like £145 to buy brand new why is this? even though it's been out a few years

Thanks

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Comments

exampasser

I've never used an Intel Q6600 so I can't comment on performance, but you can buy a newer processor such as an AMD 955 quad-core for less (used Amazon's UK site for comparisons.)

Asif Dasl

I would agree, a cheaper AMD would be a better option. £100 for an second-hand socket 775 seems a bit much, maybe push him to £75 if you've already got a board lined up for it. Otherwise I would go with an AMD AM3 board & processor that you can at least upgrade to a 6 core processor if you wanted at a later date.

WafflesAndRootbeer

I have a Q6600 in my desktop. It's a great little processor and takes whatever I throw at it because of it's monster 8 MB cache and I've also got 16GB of RAM backing it up so it works wonderfully. I wouldn't buy the chip used unless it was already installed in a board and it worked. IMO, you should definitely seek out a newer Intel quad-core if you can afford it.

Asif Dasl

You can compare processors here

SteveLord

It's fine unless you plan to game with it. They can't keep up with the latest games, unless well overclocked. My soon to be upgraded home server will my old one.

WafflesAndRootbeer wrote: »

I have a Q6600 in my desktop. It's a great little processor and takes whatever I throw at it because of it's monster 8 MB cache and I've also got 16GB of RAM backing it up so it works wonderfully. I wouldn't buy the chip used unless it was already installed in a board and it worked. IMO, you should definitely seek out a newer Intel quad-core if you can afford it.

I also wouldn't classify 8MB of cache as "monster" or significant in any way. Because it isn't. Cache (L2 especially) makes little difference in performance. Cache helps Intel justify higher price tags more than anything.

ConradJ

I have a Q6600 in my desktop and have yet to find any game that pushes it to the max.

ally_uk

Ive never really got on with AMD, ive seem quad core Phenoms and stuff but they were like meh they just felt really slow in comparison with Intel Kit. Seriously customer bought in a Vista rig with a quad core Phenom and it was running like **** even after a clean install I was like wtf?

Asif Dasl

I think your problem was it was Vista!

I've an AMD Athlon II X4 640 in two of my machines and they run fine with Windows 7. When I get enough money together I'll drop a Phenom II X6 1100T in to the boards to double the processing power. Not quite Intel Sandy Bridge i7 2600K territory but still not too bad, and nowhere near as expensive. But then I've 2 machines so I want to keep the cost down as much as possible.

bigmantenor

In theory, I have no problem buying a used processor, as long as I can test its functionality and have a sense of how hard it has been driven for its lifespan. However, with how low the prices are right now for some quality processors (such as the Phenom II 955), I would just as soon buy one new. Newegg often has excellent combo deals for CPU/memory or CPU/motherboard, etc. (Don't know how that works out for you in the UK though

). My $.02.

Coolhandluke

I have a Q6600 in my main home desktop and its always served very well, never had problems with anything I have thrown at it. However, i'm sure I paid around £100 for it new around 3-4 years ago, £100 for a used one is over priced in my opinion. Maybe £50 and I would consider it as its a quad core and all.

ally_uk

Foxconn - Products: Motherboard

This is the motherboard I have, What chip would you I go for? I want it to at least run Windows 7 and Server 2k8 in VM. I'm not a games player just want something which will be future proof for a bit and allow me to get hands on

Asif Dasl

See if you can get the Q6600 for about £75-£80. It's an old socket type so there is no future proofing about it. It's the cheapest route to getting a machine running Windows 7 & 2008. FWIW the benchmark for the Q6600 and the processor in my machine are similar so it'll be fine for VMs and such, it just means you'll have to replace both the board and processor on your next upgrade. The board runs DDR3 so you might be able to re-use the RAM in a future machine.

hex_omega

I dunno. isn't Q660 1st gen C2D? It's a bit dated by now and I think that would be a little overpriced.

exampasser

Since you already have a motherboard I would do what Asif Dasl suggested if you want to take the least expensive route.

Asif Dasl

The other processor I would recommend would be a Q9550 or a Q9650 both quad core as is the Q6600 but they are 50% faster but do you really want to spend around £200 on an old processor?

i7 and i7 v2 have come out since then and the AMD AM3 socket is really flexible on processor upgrades.

For a cheaper price the Q6600 could be a happy medium.

ally_uk

Yeah you are right the board supports 8 gig of ram though so that wouldn't be to shabby with a older processor

WafflesAndRootbeer

ally_uk wrote: »

Yeah you are right the board supports 8 gig of ram though so that wouldn't be to shabby with a older processor

It think you will like it. I ran at 8 initially before bumping up to 16 to get the most I could out of the system. Just be sure to put in the right kind of HDDs and you'll do fine.

SteveLord

ConradJ wrote: »

I have a Q6600 in my desktop and have yet to find any game that pushes it to the max.

Then you haven't played any modern games like Bad Company 2, Rift, Crysis 2 or Metro 2033. Or you're playing on a smaller resolution.

ally_uk

Change of plan was looking at the Q8300 has anyone owened this chip?

Intel Core 2 Quad Q8300 2.5GHz Socket 775 1333FSB 4MB.. | Ebuyer.com

Asif Dasl

Asif Dasl wrote: »

You can compare processors here

ally_uk wrote: »

Change of plan was looking at the Q8300 has anyone owened this chip?

It's identical to the Q6600 but for a 20% increase in speed.

ConradJ

SteveLord wrote: »

Then you haven't played any modern games like Bad Company 2, Rift, Crysis 2 or Metro 2033. Or you're playing on a smaller resolution.

You have me there, I haven't played any of those. Though I have got Crysis 2, time has been against me. I'll give it a go and report back.

WafflesAndRootbeer

ConradJ wrote: »

You have me there, I haven't played any of those. Though I have got Crysis 2, time has been against me. I'll give it a go and report back.

So long as you have enough memory and a system that isn't really bottlenecked with a lack of memory or a decent GPU, you can play them well. Metro 2033 is poorly coded and very inefficient with system resources so it doesn't really play well on a lot of systems and it's the only title I couldn't play well on my system from that list.

SteveLord

WafflesAndRootbeer wrote: »

So long as you have enough memory and a system that isn't really bottlenecked with a lack of memory or a decent GPU, you can play them well. Metro 2033 is poorly coded and very inefficient with system resources so it doesn't really play well on a lot of systems and it's the only title I couldn't play well on my system from that list.

Memory has little effect on most games beyond 4GB (which has been the sweet spot for years now). Filling your computer up with memory is just silly if you don't utilize it with things like Adobe or virtualization software.

WafflesAndRootbeer

SteveLord wrote: »

Memory has little effect on most games beyond 4GB (which has been the sweet spot for years now). Filling your computer up with memory is just silly if you don't utilize it with things like Adobe or virtualization software.

The whole point of having more memory is that applications won't have to share it, therefore allowing them to run more efficiently by not having to swap resources. ANYONE who works as an IT professional should know that is one of the great benefits of a 64-bit operating system. You won't find people running a gaming PC with less than 8GB unless they are cheap/poor or don't know any better because having 8GB gives any 32-bit gaming application a full space of memory to use in most cases. 12-16GB is the sweet spot for a modern PC because that gives you plenty of memory to game and do other things simultaneously. I run with at least 16GB on all my desktops and 8GB on all my notebooks which gives me far better performance than a system with only 4GB.

SteveLord

WafflesAndRootbeer wrote: »

The whole point of having more memory is that applications won't have to share it, therefore allowing them to run more efficiently by not having to swap resources. ANYONE who works as an IT professional should know that is one of the great benefits of a 64-bit operating system. You won't find people running a gaming PC with less than 8GB unless they are cheap/poor or don't know any better because having 8GB gives any 32-bit gaming application a full space of memory to use in most cases. 12-16GB is the sweet spot for a modern PC because that gives you plenty of memory to game and do other things simultaneously. I run with at least 16GB on all my desktops and 8GB on all my notebooks which gives me far better performance than a system with only 4GB.

Doesn't affect framerate. And there are no full 64bit games. At best, it shaves your load times by a hair. ANYONE that's actually played PC games for years should know this.

Here's a test

Another test...translated.

There are plenty of testimonials from people allover the net who will back them up.

If you can find something to prove otherwise, I'd like to see it.

Lamini

my 2yen

I run 2x q6600s at home since 2007, one on the EVGA 650sli board, the other on an asus p5n-d. I bought them as i built a dozen at work on asus commando boards and thought they were very stable. I also run one as a duplicator with 8 burners on it. As the years pass i contemplate on upgrading them... but they sit at 3.2ghz with h-50s keeping them cool. Ive done dragon age, then dragon age II just fine though the graphics had to be tuned down some as I still run the old 8800gts. CPU's taking a dent, but not much. I can run multiple XP VMs w/ an server VM with little ssues in performance. I've thrown any OS from linux to any flavor of Windows client/server OS on it just fine.

I also run a pair of np9280's (SAGER) (i7-960s) w/ RAM maxxed out (12gb). Theres a nice very noticeable jump in performance; like, in the time i compressed a 20gb file (max compression) on the q6600 on a pair raid0'd 10,000rpm raptors, i did it more than twice on the i7 (im sure the pair of intel SSDs in raid0 helped). VMs run quite a bit better here of course. DAII was almost perfect, if it were not for the graphics card (mobile version of the 8800gts). But hey, these are workstations :P

hex_omega

SteveLord wrote: »

Doesn't affect framerate. And there are no full 64bit games. At best, it shaves your load times by a hair. ANYONE that's actually played PC games for years should know this.

Here's a test

Another test...translated.

There are plenty of testimonials from people allover the net who will back them up.

If you can find something to prove otherwise, I'd like to see it.

I was running 2 gigs on my WIn 7 rig for the longest time and I had no trouble running Crysis with that. Frame rates were pretty good.

It's really all about your video card. (I have a GTX 260)