Q6600 - Worth £79?

$79 pounds? That's approx $130?

Yes, that is worth it. E8200 Dual Cores are going for $120 Newegg, and the cheaper Quad Core at Microcenter is the Q8200 for $130 (I think $150ish at Newgg).

The Q6600 has 8mbs of cache (6 more than the Q8200) and 7 mhz faster. (although the Q8200 has a more efficient architecture so it's probably faster clock-per-clock and runs cooler due to the 45nm tech)

However, the Q6600 is very overclockable, easily reaching 3GHz on medicore air coolers and reaching up to 3.6-4GHz on good air cooling. That makes it just as good as say a Q9400, which costs around $180 on Newegg.

Just to add to what Bluescreen said.....there are also quite a few motherboards out there ( thinking P965 chipset ) that do not support 45nm CPUs at least not officially. Just for that reason there is still a market for the Q6600.

So I agree its a good deal especially if they lap it for you.

I would not buy it if you have to buy a new MB to support it though. Im guessing from the P4 640 and DDR2 800 you have a board that supports it though.

Oh come on. Lap it for free? I'm sure what they mean is they have a lapped Q6600 they want rid of. Nobody is going to spend hours lapping a cpu 'for free'.

If it works in your mobo it's a reasonable buy, nothing more. On the other hand you can probably still get £90 for it on ebay so it's almost worth buying for that alone.

As for 4ghz, I seriously doubt that unless you have some extreme mobo and memory combination also.

If it's the older B3 stepping Q6600 you can forget about 3.6ghz too, in fact you'll be lucky to get 3.2ghz.

Still, it's a decent enough chip yet at a reasonable price. Don't bother with the lapped one, I wouldnt trust that to be new.

I agree that 4GHz is optimistic, but 3.6 is definitely doable (since it's almost guaranteed to be a G0).

I'd say it's worth it if it fits the motherboard.

Well my G0 Q6600 maxes out at 3.45ghz and not a mhz more. It's not heat or volts (I've had it at 1.58v) it simply will not be stable above 3.45ghz. My mobo isn't the greatest but it's better than any dell.

Just don't be disappointed if your Q6600 doesn't get to 3.6ghz.

Now, i would say you can get a better with AMD, which are known to be good overclockers. At 80 pounds you can get a much better AMD processor.

If you have an LGA775 motherboard for it, go ahead - especially if you have some

Mine on the other hand goes to 3.6GHz easy (so long as I keep my filters clean on the case) on air (freezer 7 pro, so nothing special) in my P35 board (Asus P5K-E)

Depends on the chip as well as the mobo.

(Unlucky Jenny)

The lower 3GHz range seems to be about as far as my G0 will go and stay stable as well, and that's on an eVGA 680i SLI board. Sometimes you luck out and get a processor that overclocks great, sometimes you don't. It's always a gamble when you're overclocking.

Put it this way, if I can get the 6600 (it is G0 stepping BTW) to around 3.4Ghz without any fancy heatsinks and cooling systems, then I am by far more then happy. I also was only planning on OC'ing via a decent program, opposed to doing it via Bios which will always keep it OC'ed. (pointless)

I'm upgrading from a Pentium 4 (so belive me, at stock speeds, the 6600 is by far more then enough for me needs at stock) and only will I OC when I want to play games. (I'm planning on getting a 26" HDTV for my room.)

O, and about the lapping, they said they can lap it within a hour for me, right there. I doubt its a old chip, I will ask them to be sure. But I don't think so, I've been buying from them for years (on most things) any they don't look like the type to shimmy of second hand goods as new.

The heat generated by the method they are going to use may well kill the CPU, lapping a CPU properly takes a lot longer than an hour.

No one mentioned that there will be no bios overclocking on a dell

Good point.

I know. I don't consider it unlucky as it idles at 29C at 3.45ghz and never gives me any real problems. I'm just saying, not all and quite probably very few Q6600's will reach 3.6ghz.

Lapping my core 2 duo e8400 took about 3 hours with breaks, but it still isn't fully flat but i like it the way it is since it dropped 3C load is worth the effort as i also got to 3.6ghz using less volts now  

Running My Q6600 at 3.6Ghz with Thermalright ultima-90 on a Asus Maximus Formula for close to 18 months now without issue.
Idle around 38c load at 56c, thats with speed step enabled to clock it back down to 2.4Ghz when not fully in use.

Worth it if you can set it up stable.

Who said anything about a Dell?  

sorry i was on the wrong thread

No worries  

I thought you had a dell too...but now i noticed it's dell memory. How did you manage that lol.

When my old Dell PC blew out, (well, the motherboard and PSU) I managed to save pretty much everything else. (RAM/GPU/CPU/HDD) I bought a MicroATX case, slapped in a Gigabyte G31 motherboard and Walla!