Any use keeping an old Q6600?

[spdfreak]

The MSI P6N SLI motherboard that this cpu is in is dying the slow death- certain devices disappearing, USB ports not working, etc. Is the cpu worth finding another MB or shall I retire it with a pat on the back? It has been running my media center PC for years but after building a new Ryzen system, I'm using my old PII 1075T system for the media center.

 

[DrMrLordX]

Retire it. If you want some indicator of "what it's good for", a Q6600 is worth maybe $10 on eBay today.

Take that for what it's worth.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Yeah, if you were still using it up until recently, then it has had a good run. (I still have one BNIB!)

While you CAN get motherboards for it (ebay has some P35/P45 Gigabyte "Ultra Durable" ATX boards for $60-80), I would hesitate to go down that road, unless you have some expensive software installed, and you can find an identical replacement board (that won't trigger some sort of re-activation of said expensive software).

If this is just a home / media center / tertiary rig, then retire it.

The Q6600 was great, in its day, but these days, you can get a recent Celeron dual-core, that probably has nearly as much compute power. (Kaby Lake really does have great IPC, and they are clocked higher than the Q6600 was, at stock.)

Heck, check out my recent LLano thread, you can get an AMD quad-core APU with a 2.1/2.4 clock, that can be BCLK OCed, and you can get a "modern" Win8 Ready mobo with SATA6G and USB3.0 (A75) for $45 shipped from ebay, and you don't need a hot, expensive VGA card to run it, either.

 

[SPBHM]

I'm about to buy a Q6600 (x3220 but it's the same thing) to replace an e6300 (C2D 1.86GHz), I think it will still perform OK for web browsing.

but that's because I have the motherboard and all the rest of the PC working, and that's basically the fastest CPU the MB can handle (some old Intel G965 board),

buying a 775 board now is questionable at best, but if you can find one and have the rest of the PC (like decent amount of DDR2 and so on), I think it's fine.

 

[NTMBK]

Sell it on to someone who has a Core 2 Duo and is looking for an upgrade, that way someone gets use out of it.

 

[Excelsior]

Not really. However, I recently put a GTX 970 into my Q6700 system with 8GB of ram and it surprisingly ran some modern titles. However, someone pointed me to this: https://www.techspot.com/article/1313-intel-q6600-ten-years-later/

As a previous poster mentioned, even a current budget processor would obliterate a C2Q processor and use much less power while doing so.

 

[Yuriman]

I think they still perform alright for general desktop usage. The problems are more in the power consumption (especially when idle), the available connectivity (USB 3/c?), and the cost of other components (need video card, motherboards can be pricey).

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

Use it to beef up an old 775 rig.

No point in building a "new" rig around it when you throw a stone,
and hit far better complete systems on CL for ~$100 or so
(Lenovos, Dells, etc.)

 

[spdfreak]

Yeah, I buy refurb 4th gen I5, 8GB 128G SSD off-lease systems for our shop and warehouse for about 200.00 now. That's with win 10 pro installed. I'd have to find a MB for basically nothing to make it worth my time. What to do with 4GB of DDR2 and a 9600GSO vid card...

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

^ This exactly!

And that's not even counting the occasional killer deal you can score on CL.
In the past few months, I've picked up :
- HP EliteDesk 800 G1 w/4790, 8GB, 128GB SSD - $80
- Dell OptiPlex 7020 SFF w/4590, 8GB, 256GB SSD - $60
- Dell Optiplex 7020 SFF w/4790, 4GB - $90
- HP Z800 w/o CPUs (but otherwise complete w/ 24GB, dual HSFs) - $120

As for what to do with the DDR2 and 9600GSO, maybe build a retro gaming rig of sorts?
As a point of curiosity/nostalgia, which 9600GSO is that? The "good" unlockable type, or the "bad" neutered type?

 

[VirtualLarry]

However, someone pointed me to this: https://www.techspot.com/article/1313-intel-q6600-ten-years-later/

I found that to be an interesting article, to actually see the data first-hand, although the conclusion should be obvious to any enthusiast - the Q6600 has seen better days. G4560 is way faster for games. (G4560 was not pictured, but the i3-6100 is basically a performance proxy.)

OT, but my buddy with an AM2+ board and an AM3 Athlon II X4 640 3.0Ghz, is roughly-C2Q/Q6600@3.0-esque performance. He currently has a GT610, mostly for just display output purposes, but I just ordered him a GT 730 1GB GDDR5 (from Hot Deals) for $40, in the hopes that he would be able to play minimal games, since he has a quad-core. I could upgrade him to a Phenom II X6 1045T 2.7/3.1Ghz Thuban hex-core, I have a couple of those, one of which I'm not really using, and could swap with him.

But given that Q6600 gaming review in 2017, I have my doubts. At least, a GT 730 GDDR5 version might be a bit better "match" to a 3.0Ghz Athlon II X4, than a GTX1060 would be.

N.B. I sold him a G4560 / 16GB DDR4 / GTX950 2GB GDDR5 gaming rig in Feb, so he does have a faster rig, but since he continues to use the older rig, I thought that I would give it a boost. It already is maxed out at 16GB of DDR2.

 

[rbk123]

Stock clock the the Q6600 is pretty meh, but you should be able to get it to 3.4-3.6 and it performs much better. I still use mine for my main home office rig - browsing, MS Office suite, VPN to work, etc.. With 4GB of ram and an SSD it still flies, but I don't game on it. I have another one I use as a Kodi client/web browser for an HTPC. Works great for that. So it's pretty useful for everything but gaming.

 

[Hans Gruber]

Stock clock the the Q6600 is pretty meh, but you should be able to get it to 3.4-3.6 and it performs much better. I still use mine for my main home office rig - browsing, MS Office suite, VPN to work, etc.. With 4GB of ram and an SSD it still flies, but I don't game on it. I have another one I use as a Kodi client/web browser for an HTPC. Works great for that. So it's pretty useful for everything but gaming.

I have a Q6600 that was just retired. It has 8GB of ram a P35 MSI motherboard and ran @ 3.6ghz for years. I slowed it down to 3.3ghz to save power. I can't believe people still use those CPU's today. I have no taken it apart but I like to keep old CPU's. Bought it new in 2007/08. I still use my G15 logitech gaming keyboard that is from that build to this day.

 

[ehume]

Pardon my ignorance, but what is CL?

 

[spdfreak]

Pardon my ignorance, but what is CL?

Craigslist

 

[DrMrLordX]

Craigslist?

Oops beat me to it.

 

[ehume]

Thanks to you both.

 

[StinkyPinky]

Q6600 was such a great cpu back in the day. Mostly because it could overclock well. I remember that was my first intel cpu for some time as I had gone with AMD for the previous two or three generations.

 

[Donts00tmesanta]

I'd use it in a htpc or media server rig....even a nas one

 

[Yuriman]

I'd use it in a htpc or media server rig....even a nas one

At the price of electricity in Vermont, a Q6600 left idle all year would cost $200 more in electricity than something based on a 3rd-gen or newer Celeron; basically more than the price of an entire new machine. In Europe, it would be more than twice this.

 

[SPBHM]

another problem for the Q6600 is that if you have a p35/p45 board is also how cheaply you can get those 771 Xeons which can run much faster (clocks and some gains in IPC) and use a lot less power.

but with a lower end board like G31-G41; without a "8800GTX" sucking 60W idling I would think you can get some power usage numbers you never thought possible with a Q6600.

 

[ehume]

At the price of electricity in Vermont, a Q6600 left idle all year would cost $200 more in electricity than something based on a 3rd-gen or newer Celeron; basically more than the price of an entire new machine. In Europe, it would be more than twice this.

Taken with the performance metrics, this seems to be the winning comment.

 

[LightningZ71]

Honestly, I still find Dell Optiplex 780s/790s for a song that I do some light refurb work on and sell for a decent return to others. Those 780s and 790s often have Q8400 or better processors and can handle 8 or more GB or DDR-3 DRAM. That's more than enough for casual internet users and with a ~$100 video card, can even handle light to moderate gaming. 1050s and 560s work well in them. IF you check government surplus sites, they are dumping them by the boatload for the past few years. You can also start to find 990s for Sandy Bridge systems and 7010s for Ivy Bridge systems for low prices.

 

[Ken g6]

I believe Core 2 was the last generation of Intel parts not to include the Intel Management Engine, if its insecurity matters to you.

 

[Yeroon]

Stay far away from replacing a Q6600 with anything llano as V-L hinted towards.
I got a Q6600, a P5K deluxe and 8gb ddr2 to play with last week, and for OCing fun, they are great. But for anything to use on a daily basis, I agree, too much power consumption. At 3.2Ghz I was already into 130-140w (wall) for the cpu alone (load), will need to see what 3.55ghz is, not sure I really want to know.
If the cpu was dying and the board fine, it might be cost effective to keep it going till dram prices come down. But outside that (and it sounds like that is the case) there are plenty of power efficient combos for decent prices that keeping a C2Q era chip around is not in anyones best interest.