The "Core 2 Quad" club

[cbn]

for a router sure, it's power hungry, but that's a 65W C2Q and low CPU load power usage on C2Q was fine, the main problem was with motherboards and other components, my E5420 (80W) can idle at around 40W with a G31 MB, I think it's possible to have a C2Q even lower than that,

The USDT models (ie, the little prebuilt desktops that use the power bricks) can go lower than that.....somewhere below 30W if I am not mistaken. However, they don't (to my knowledge) have expansion slots for NIC add-in cards.

 

[Billb2]

Q9400 vs Q8400


http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Core2-Quad-Q9400-vs-Intel-Core2-Quad-Q8400

 

[rbk123]

You just made my day. (Glad to see someone able to make use of that info).

So I type this on my new-to-me Q6600... Swapped out the 2140 running at 3.2g (100% overclock!) and swapped in the 6600; booted it up at stock 2.4G and..... meh. Seemed no difference, maybe slower even browsing around; navigating W10, etc...
Punched up the overclock to 3.4G and we have bush. Now it is snappy as can be.

Easily the best $12 of computer money ever spent. Thanks again for pointing it out.

 

[Smoblikat]

Core2 was amazing. I remember my $50 E5200 like it was yesterday......I ran that thing so hard the contacts on the bottom literally turned black and brown. I ran it to 105C a time or 2......

IIRC It was a 2.5ghz part that ran happily at 3.8 or angrily at 4.0 (hence the black marks). I also had a QX6700 that never lived up to the hype my E5200 did. Though the QX was in an X38 board, so I did get to play with DDR3 before it was huge.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Yeah, the E5200 was an amazing little cheap chip, great little overclocker. Kind of like the spiritual ancestor of the G3258, even though the E5200 was never unlocked. (It had to be FSB overclocked.)

 

[hojnikb]

e2140 was the budget king in its day; 100%+ overclock easy as pie

 

[BUTCH1]

e2140 was the budget king in its day; 100%+ overclock easy as pie

Yea, but with only a 1mb cache even OC the hell out if it your still not gonna get very far.

 

[VirtualLarry]

e2140 was the budget king in its day; 100%+ overclock easy as pie

Both of mine OCed to 3.2Ghz, but I had to clock one back to 2.8Ghz, as it just wasn't fully stable. Meaning, it would reboot itself, like every 4 weeks. Yes, I am demanding in my stability. Win7 64-bit was rock-solid back then, it wasn't a software issue. The other E2140 @ 3.2Ghz rig didn't do that.

 

[SPBHM]

the problem with the E2140 is that it required a more expensive board or more work to OC well, when the E21xx were new many cheap boards still had the 945 Chipset which had the max official FSB of 266MHz and I think was blocked from 1:1 memory divider for FSB 200 CPUs
the default multiplier being 8 made it hard to OC it under these conditions with cheap ram
while the E5200 with a default 12.5 multiplier was far easier, and G31 was everywhere and 945 gone.
and obviously the E5200 could reach higher clocks/lower voltage and had twice the L2

I had the G31M-S2L which was a nice cheap board for OC, with lots of adjustments and 4GHz was really easy for an e5200 (a good one, some required significant overvolt over 3.4-3.6GHz or so) and cheap DDR2 800, even without the 1:1 divider, it would get 3.75GHz with the memory at the default clock, the e2140 under the same conditions (FSB300, DDR2 800) would be stuck at 2.4GHz, so it would require a board with 1:1 divider to go further, or the BSEL mod to change the default FSB to 266 and get it, or even DDR2 1066 (or 800 with good OC potential), but, with the G31 Chipset anything over FSB 343 would OC the PCIE clock.

all those problems were gone using a higher end board, a decent P35 board would allow the 1:1 divider for FSB 200 CPUs and PCIE lock at higher FSBs, so yes, e2140 @ FSB 400 would be quite nice with a good board, but the E5200 was good with any board, very easy to OC and decent even at stock settings, E2140 was quite slow at stock settings, it was slower than a Pentium D in many occasion

 

[BUTCH1]

e2140 was the budget king in its day; 100%+ overclock easy as pie

Yea, but with only a 1mb cache even OC the hell out if it your still not gonna get very far.

the problem with the E2140 is that it required a more expensive board or more work to OC well, when the E21xx were new many cheap boards still had the 945 Chipset which had the max official FSB of 266MHz and I think was blocked from 1:1 memory divider for FSB 200 CPUs
the default multiplier being 8 made it hard to OC it under these conditions with cheap ram
while the E5200 with a default 12.5 multiplier was far easier, and G31 was everywhere and 945 gone.
and obviously the E5200 could reach higher clocks/lower voltage and had twice the L2

I had the G31M-S2L which was a nice cheap board for OC, with lots of adjustments and 4GHz was really easy for an e5200 (a good one, some required significant overvolt over 3.4-3.6GHz or so) and cheap DDR2 800, even without the 1:1 divider, it would get 3.75GHz with the memory at the default clock, the e2140 under the same conditions (FSB300, DDR2 800) would be stuck at 2.4GHz, so it would require a board with 1:1 divider to go further, or the BSEL mod to change the default FSB to 266 and get it, or even DDR2 1066 (or 800 with good OC potential), but, with the G31 Chipset anything over FSB 343 would OC the PCIE clock.

all those problems were gone using a higher end board, a decent P35 board would allow the 1:1 divider for FSB 200 CPUs and PCIE lock at higher FSBs, so yes, e2140 @ FSB 400 would be quite nice with a good board, but the E5200 was good with any board, very easy to OC and decent even at stock settings, E2140 was quite slow at stock settings, it was slower than a Pentium D in many occasion

LOL, I'm running that Gigabyte board right now with an E5450@3.5Ghz, it would easily get to 4 but I'm running a cheap Foxconn cooler and I can't see throwing more $$ at a 775 chip cooling when the MOBO only allows 4Gb RAM. Shi*, if I could stuff it with 16Gb I'd get a better cooler and run this rig for 3 more years..

 

[SPBHM]

Yea, but with only a 1mb cache even OC the hell out if it your still not gonna get very far.


LOL, I'm running that Gigabyte board right now with an E5450@3.5Ghz, it would easily get to 4 but I'm running a cheap Foxconn cooler and I can't see throwing more $$ at a 775 chip cooling when the MOBO only allows 4Gb RAM. Shi*, if I could stuff it with 16Gb I'd get a better cooler and run this rig for 3 more years..

E5450 the Xeon? that's quite nice that it's handling it at 3.5GHz, but yes, the memory limitation is a problem, back in 2008 4GB limit was not a big negative, but now it certainly is... the same limit applies to G41 with DDR2, but with DDR3 it seems to work with 8GB (even if the official limit is also 4GB),

I've used that board for a few years on my main PC, I had problems (shutdown with p95) when I tried to OC a 65nm C2Q to high, but the board is still being used by a relative with a Pentium E5400...

my Xeon E5420 now runs (stock) with a newer but inferior G31 board from Asrock.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I had the G31M-S2L which was a nice cheap board for OC, with lots of adjustments and 4GHz was really easy for an e5200 (a good one, some required significant overvolt over 3.4-3.6GHz or so) and cheap DDR2 800, even without the 1:1 divider, it would get 3.75GHz with the memory at the default clock, the e2140 under the same conditions (FSB300, DDR2 800) would be stuck at 2.4GHz, so it would require a board with 1:1 divider to go further, or the BSEL mod to change the default FSB to 266 and get it, or even DDR2 1066 (or 800 with good OC potential), but, with the G31 Chipset anything over FSB 343 would OC the PCIE clock.

Yep, been there, done that. (For a few folks.) That was a really great and cheap overclocking combo, much like the G3258 and certain cheap H81 micro-ATX boards. (More recent.)

 

[Charlie22911]

The USDT models (ie, the little prebuilt desktops that use the power bricks) can go lower than that.....somewhere below 30W if I am not mistaken. However, they don't (to my knowledge) have expansion slots for NIC add-in cards.

Bingo! It's an HP Elite 8000 USDT. They don't have expansion slots, but you can use a managed switch (Netgear GS108T) and a vlan to get the job done.

You can also just use the internal mini PCIe slot to add a second nic as I did.

 

[Fanatical Meat]

Q9650 w/8GB checking in my Brothers.
I added an ssd last year and the machine if fabulous. Runs every game I throw at it but it does have troubles with SC and some problems with Conan Exiles.
I've been thinking it time for a new build but I haven't seen much reason to do so other than use my Q9650 as a game server but:
A) I have no idea how to do it
B) I'm not sure if its powerful enough.

 

[TurtleCrusher]

Q9650 w/8GB checking in my Brothers.
I added an ssd last year and the machine if fabulous. Runs every game I throw at it but it does have troubles with SC and some problems with Conan Exiles.
I've been thinking it time for a new build but I haven't seen much reason to do so other than use my Q9650 as a game server but:
A) I have no idea how to do it
B) I'm not sure if its powerful enough.

Unless things have changed dramatically since I did this, but about 8 years ago I ran a 24-player Day of Defeat (Think CS:S but WW2) server from a Pentium 3 ~700mhz from home without a hitch. A dedicated NIC is all I would suggest with a home game server. A quad core anything should be good as there will be at least two threads available for game IO the entire time. I would set it up and see if you should underclock and undervolt the C2Q.