What's This It Costs More Than A Sandy Bridge?

Old processors cost a lot after production stops.

+1

This might help you:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-cpu-review-o...

Supply vs. Demand! U sleep through that lecture??? lol

Expensive does not always mean better. Yes, it is an upgrade from a pentium 4, but you could get a Sandy Bridge i3 that beats both for $120.

Q9650 and Q9xxx processors still compare to sb chips.

Supply/Demand. 9000 series quads are still competitive with AMD's Phenom II/FX lineups, but production stopped years ago. So theres still a bit of demand, but very small supply. That means higher prices.

That chip is one of the faster Core 2 Quad CPUs and one of the fastest chips that can be put in an LGA775 motherboard. The Core 2s came between the Pentium 4s and the Nehalem/Sandy Bridge CPUs and were Intel's first truly decent chips since they retired the Pentium III. "Yorkfield" is the code name for that particular model series of Core 2 Quad. Just about every CPU has a code name since there are different series of CPUs being sold with the same model name. For example just with the Core 2 Quads, there are three different series using different silicon:

- Kentsfield (Core 2 Quad Q6000 series)- four cores, 65 nm lithography, 2x4 MB of L2 cache.
- Yorkfield-6M (Core 2 Quad Q8000 series)- four cores, 45 nm lithography, 2x3 MB of L2 cache
- Yorkfield (Core 2 Quad Q9000 series)- four cores, 45 nm lithography, 2x6 MB of L2 cache

This particular chip is certainly faster than any Pentium 4. I wouldn't call it an upgrade to the P4 since this model came out years after the P4s were retired and any motherboard that once held a Pentium 4 is very, very unlikely to support this chip. Yorkfields were really an upgrade to the earlier Core 2 Duos and Core 2 Quad Kentsfields, as they can generally be used in the same motherboards. A Sandy Bridge quad-core like an i5-2400 is going to be faster than this Q9550, a Sandy Bridge dual-core like a Pentium or i3-21xx/23xx may or may not be faster in all tasks since the Core 2 Quads have four real cores.



The Q9550 was a very expensive CPU when it was new, I seem to remember it cost $500-600 or so. The price hasn't gone up, it just hasn't gone down much. The Q9550 is one of the fastest chips to work in an LGA775 motherboard and thus a very desirable chip for people to get to upgrade a Core 2 Duo or C2Q Kentsfield unit. You see prices stay unusually high on the fastest chips that a particular socket/platform supports because of this reason.

This was one of the last and fastest Intel® Core™ 2 Quad processors that we released. The next microarchitecture included a number of major changes including changing over from having the memory controller on the motherboard to moving it onto the processor. This processor would have gone for just under $300 when it was new. It has been discontinued for almost 3 years now.

Christian Wood
Intel Enthusiast Team