Those stickers are pointless. I mean I've been guilty of returning something and forgetting to throw in the cat5 cable that it came with, etc.
OH, they implemented an open box discount quite a while ago on those new stickers you see. A whole 5% off, Woo Hoo. Let's party. Though half the time the msrp drops and then the open box price is higher than the cost of the item new.
To the gentleman who indicated they were sold out, They still had a few left in Woodland Hills last night. I picked up the one I had on hold from Friday with the G0 stepping. It seems my MB has an over clocking limit though I've never heard of such a thing. But this CPU and the previous e6400 can not take more than 600mhz above stock clock. Doesn't matter how you get there, reducing the multiplier, or raising voltage, etc. But Stock clock on the Q6600 is 2.4ghz so I'm relatively happy with 3.0ghz X 4. Though I wish my Gigabyte MB had a few more options for FSB
DR2 settings because I'm running 800mhz Ram @ 667mhz in this configuration. The ram is rated 4-4-4-12 @ 800mhz so I kept this for the 667mhz.
I just ran one small little bench mark so far that has be convinced that if you are going to use a program built for multi cores, especially more than 2, this is going to be a hard one to beat and impossible for a native 2 core non quad CPU. A quick and dirty benchmark that runs fast but is very accurate and respected is Wprime. They have a quick and thorough test. You submit your results for free and can see your ranking of your various submissions and multiple machines if you wish. This will tell you right off the bat if your quad is running at the minimum of what you should get stock but here people are showing off their over clocking abilities. I head into this latest submission with 12ghz of usable processing power and I more than doubled my E6400 CPU I replaced that was a Dual 2.75ghz.
The chart shows among the entire database of their members that I have one of the fastest rigs out there, but in terms of comparing only to other Q6600 submitted results, I am in the 75% or so bracket. Thats not unheard of because one review I read before buying this showed a comparison between the Intel E6850 Duo and Q6600 Quad. They had stable clocks that amazed me. The e6850 they clocked at 3.85ghz and the Q6600 was at 3.6ghz. With fuctinoality at 3.7ghz but for the sake for stress testing and benchmarking, a stable clock is the only acceptable method.
If I get bored or curious or both, I may do the daring thing and swap out this Quad with my Favorite over clocking board I've ever owned and was a mere $39 refurbished at Fry's sporting the P35 chipset vs my Gigabyte with Intel's 965. That Abit is running the e4500 which as a stock stock of 2.2ghz but runs without a hitch at 3.0ghz. This is my server so there isn't much time to mess around but that machine has been relatively stable without tweaking anything but FSB and a little voltage boasting at least 1.0ghz over stock clock on this e4500 @ 3.2ghz. I don't need my server to have that much power but my main tower it can always be useful with the globs of multimedia editing I do. We shall see on that.
I mentioned in an earlier post if anyone has any success stories with bios setting that worked good for you with the Q6600 you'd like to share, to please do so.
Link to Download Wprime for Free
Please share your results. It's free and quick.
Over and out.
Scott
SMZ
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