[Techspot] Q6600 a decade later - does it still game?

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

Yup Q6600 is the one and the only CPU I have managed to kill. It was a terrible chip all around.

I can't imagine that Q6600 would be easier to kill than a Duron or Thunderbird.
I'm ashamed to say that I killed quite a few Duron 800s back in the day when doing HSF reviews (either cracking the die or having it go up in flames from improper HSF seating)

 

[bigboxes]

I probably still have the 3200+ lying around somewhere with my Abit NF7. I remember applying paste to the little die and spreading it around with a plastic stick.

OC'd to a whopping 2.4Ghz on 3rd party BIOS and I could still barely play Bioshock. Did work though, so slow clap I suppose.

What year was that? I upgraded to an Athlon 64 X2 in 2006. Did a write up on another site about the build and made charts showing the difference in benchmarks from the old CPU (3200+) to the new one (4400+).

 

[bigboxes]

I can't imagine that Q6600 would be easier to kill than a Duron or Thunderbird.
I'm ashamed to say that I killed quite a few Duron 800s back in the day when doing HSF reviews (either cracking the die or having it go up in flames from improper HSF seating)

Old man look at my life
I'm a lot like you were

I never o/c my Thunderbird. It was so damn fast I never attempted an o/c. I remember when I built that thing. It was so fast. It felt like web pages would (almost) instantly load. Beat the hell out of my former Intel setup. Still have that case. Don't use it, but still have it. Were you supplied with those Duron and Thunderbird CPUs that you tested?

 

[EXCellR8]

What year was that? ...

'03 or '04... I was totally poor and wouldn't upgrade my gear until like mid 2008 when I was forced to do so for gaming.

you got a link to that write up? I'd give it a read.

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

Old man look at my life
I'm a lot like you were

I never o/c my Thunderbird. It was so damn fast I never attempted an o/c. I remember when I built that thing. It was so fast. It felt like web pages would (almost) instantly load. Beat the hell out of my former Intel setup. Still have that case. Don't use it, but still have it. Were you supplied with those Duron and Thunderbird CPUs that you tested?

Yes and no. AMD did sponsor a single Duron and a single Thunderbird, but the rest were self-financed retail CPUs

 

[bigboxes]

'03 or '04... I was totally poor and wouldn't upgrade my gear until like mid 2008 when I was forced to do so for gaming.

you got a link to that write up? I'd give it a read.

Sorry. That community went belly-up in 2014 after a 15 year run. You know how sad it is when a place you went every day dies. I think I had over 100k posts. I was a site admin too. I did find the write up in a file I saved as a web page. Got one for my upgrade in 2009 (4400+ to i7 920) as well. Never thought the website would go away. Now boxes is bummed.

Boxes PC Upgrade Project 2006 <<< Click on the link, download file, extract to location, keep all files in one location, open HTML document to view web page as it was some ten years ago.

With pics like this how can you not check it out!

 

[John Connor]

My Q6600 still games.

BF2 AIX mod

FS2004

COD Modern Warefare

BFBC2

GTA IV

You name it!

HAHAHA

 

[EXCellR8]

Sorry. That community went belly-up in 2014 after a 15 year run. You know how sad it is when a place you went every day dies. I think I had over 100k posts. I was a site admin too. I did find the write up in a file I saved as a web page. Got one for my upgrade in 2009 (4400+ to i7 920) as well. Never thought the website would go away. Now boxes is bummed.

Boxes PC Upgrade Project 2006 <<< Click on the link, download file, extract to location, keep all files in one location, open HTML document to view web page as it was some ten years ago.

pretty neat. i remember having those Zalman VGA coolers with the little blue heat sinks on my old 6 (and possibly 7) series nvidia cards back in the day. the one card I should have held on to was my XFX 7950GT AGP. It became a very niche and low production card and I actually got a bit of cash for it when I sold it off, moving to PCIe (finally).

 

[Candleflight]

I'm playing Battlefield1 quite happily on a Q6600 @ 3.00Ghz with 8GDDR2/SSD. Interesting thing is the P35 chipset in my Asus P5K m/b is PCIe v1.1 whereas my GT970 4G is PCIe v3 compatible, but it works fine.

 

[Denithor]

With pics like this how can you not check it out!

I had quite a few of those PC Toys round IDE cables that I used for years and years, kept recycling into new boxes as I upgraded. Might even have a few around in a box of parts somewhere. Ah, memories...

 

[dtgoodwin]

Wasn't the Q6600 2 dual cores linked by FSB?

 

[VirtualLarry]

Wasn't the Q6600 2 dual cores linked by FSB?

Yes. Amazing how well it worked, compared to AMD's "native" quad-core, the Phenom.

 

[Arachnotronic]

Yes. Amazing how well it worked, compared to AMD's "native" quad-core, the Phenom.

Ironically, AMD is now the one pursuing MCM for their >8 core CPUs in servers, while Intel is the one doing monolithic 28 core dies

 

[bigboxes]

I had quite a few of those PC Toys round IDE cables that I used for years and years, kept recycling into new boxes as I upgraded. Might even have a few around in a box of parts somewhere. Ah, memories...

Yup. Did much the same. Even got around to getting a round floppy cable. I still have them in boxes, but don't use any PATA/IDE devices any longer. I didn't give up all my PATA HDDs overnight. Replaced them with larger SATA drives when I expanded and could afford to do so.

 

[CHADBOGA]

Sorry. That community went belly-up in 2014 after a 15 year run. You know how sad it is when a place you went every day dies. I think I had over 100k posts. I was a site admin too.

Ace's Hardware?

 

[EXCellR8]

knew i had some old pics floating around on some neglected hard drive...

haha, external radiator and anti-kink coils... pretty rad. i'm actually still using that pump in one of my other machines. it's almost 10 years old.

 

[Yuriman]

It's a shame I don't have a pic of it, but I ran dual HD3850's with my Q6600 for a long time, and then later an HD4870, then dual 4870's, before swapping the Q6600 for my current i5 + HD7850 (replaced last week). Swiftech custom loop w/dual video card waterblocks and a triple 120mm rad mounted on top of my case.. I went through two MCP350's over the useful life of that CPU, running them 24/7.

 

[MongGrel]

Used to run this big chunk of copper TRUE on my Q6600 when I had it at 4.0.

Still use it on a X5650 in the bedroom for a HTPC, on a different Mobo of course.

You can't just slap a hex core into a Q6600 slot, unless there were other Xeons I had not tried out prior to that.

 

[bigboxes]

Was the P6T Deluxe v2 the most popular board or what?

 

[MongGrel]

Was the P6T Deluxe v2 the most popular board or what?

Possibly, there are a lot of them still around

I stupidly fried one in my early building days.

Gigabyte had a really popular model at the time also that sold in droves.

GA-EP45-UD3P, I think they sold a ton of those.

Was about the time I started using ASUS boards myself really, I'd had a couple older Gigabyte T-Bird Mobos crap out at the time from green leaking caps.

I doubt that happens these days, but it made me leery after the past experiences and have used ASUS for builds.

 

[EXCellR8]

Was the P6T Deluxe v2 the most popular board or what?

i originally picked up a used P6T base model back in 2009 or so because it had both LGA 775 and 1366 mount holes for coolers. i did have the DX V2 some time later with a 6-core i7, but it was a spare and I sold it off within a year.

 

[Marburg U]

9.5 years ago i did 4 right things when i built my rig:
skipped the Q6600 for a E6750
picked 2GB of DDR2 over 4GB
bought a mature Vista64 instead of XP
Spent money for a 8800GT

Through the course of these last almost 10 years i upgraded my system with mostly second handed components. Now i still play at 1050p with a Q9550@3.8, a R9 270x, 8GB of ram, and an SSD.

I'm particularly glad i saved money and avoided the Q6600, if not: i doubt i would have spent money on a second handed Q9550 a few years later, but Yorkfield was even better than Kentsfield.

Also, after almost 10 years, after 3 GPU, 2 CPU, 3 added HDD\SSD, 8 different dimms, after changing all the caps inside my Syncmaster 2232bw, the most astonishingly thing is that my Enermax Liberty 500 is still going, with everything running overclocked for the past 10 years, without blinking.

My only regret for the Core2 era is to not have tried out to win two bids for specimens of Q6400 and E8700 when i saw those things on Ebay, at a stupidly low price, some years ago.

 

[superstition]

i remember having those Zalman VGA coolers with the little blue heat sinks on my old 6 (and possibly 7) series nvidia cards back in the day.

I have a 3870 512MB GDDR4 with one. It was installed by the factory. The card still works, too. I managed to get it working in Windows 10.

 

[alcoholbob]

It might be still okay for gaming, but I imagine web browsing on ad infested sites would be a snails crawl on a Q6600. I have dual core (E8500) from that gen and it takes something like 10x longer to load Slickdeals or some other webpages compared to even a low power m-processor from the broadwell/skylake gen. Hell even an Android tablet is faster these days at web browsing.

 

[MongGrel]

i originally picked up a used P6T base model back in 2009 or so because it had both LGA 775 and 1366 mount holes for coolers. i did have the DX V2 some time later with a 6-core i7, but it was a spare and I sold it off within a year.

The V2's still sell for a lot these days.

Is one of the best boards ever made in it's day.