Meet Our CPU, For The Last Time
Yes, once again—though likely for the last time—we chose the long standing people’s champion of quad-core CPUs, the Q6600.
Read Customer Reviews of Intel’s Core 2 Quad Q6600
This decision might surprise the dual-core fans out there, who believe that the E8400 would be a better choice due to its overclocking capability. And we agree with you, but we wanted to give the Q6600 a final kick at the can to see what a newer G0 revision core could accomplish. The Q6600 we previously tested was an old sample, so we got our hands on a brand new CPU to play with to see if it would overclock better than our old workhorse.
While the Q6600 has gotten a little long in the tooth, its 2.4 GHz stock speed and four processing cores are still no slouch ; they are known to overclock at least 1 GHz over that frequency pretty reliably. With the new stepping, our hopes were to approach the 3.7 GHz range. Our previous sample seemed to become unreliable at anything past 3.4 GHz, so we’re going to see if we can squeeze some extra MHz out of this new toy with Swiftech’s excellent H20-220 water-cooling kit.