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The Q6600 Is a fantastic new chip by Intel. It provides the end user with an extremely powerful, cheap and multi-purpose chip. At one point this chip would cost you £500 alone. Now they have cut the price down to roughly £170 making it the perfect choice for enthusiasts and gamers alike. The Q6600 has four cores each running at 2.4Ghz with 8mb L2 cache which means it can do four times the work in the same amount of time compared to a single 2.4Ghz core. The Q6600 runs on a 1066Mhz FSB (FSB is the "Front Side Bus" this tells the processor how fast to run when combined with the processor's multiplier which is different depending on which CPU you buy. Increasing the FSB will increase the speed of the processor, known as "Overclocking", there is a section
in this review on overclocking for those who are interested.)
Overclocking:
Overclocking is the art of making your PC parts run faster than they are rated by the manufacturer. For overclocking the CPU this is usually done through the BIOS (Basic Input/Output System) which can be accessed by pressing a key that is stated on screen when you first turn on your computer. It is recommended for those who are looking into overclocking to thoroughly read some guides on the internet, or you may end up frying your chip completely. (and overclocking voids warranties so you won't get a refund either.) However if you are careful and know what you are doing you can increase the performance of your pc much more than it normally operates at. The Q6600 is based on the Core 2 archetecture (aka Conroe) which is much more effective than the old Pentium 4 netburst archetecture. Due to the better efficiency you can reach extreme overclocks on the Q6600, as much as 50% overclock on air (Usually stable at around 3.2Ghz with B3 stepping or 3.4Ghz with G0 stepping. See "Steppings" for more information) and around 100% on water (You can reach speeds faster than 4Ghz with watercooling! That's 16Ghz of power in total over all four cores!)
Installation:
The installation of the Q6600 or any Socket 775 CPU (See the "Socket Type" heading for more detail on what a socket is) is fairly simple. All you need to do is lift the small lever on the side of the base that the chip sits on which will release the clamps that hold the CPu in place, then place the cpu onto the slot(Socket 775 CPU's have no pins on the bottom, they are all on the motherboard now so it's quite hard to actually bend the pins, unlike on old processors where they could easily get bent and you'd either have to carefully bend them back perfectly or buy a whole new processor.) making sure the processor is the right way round, to find which way the processor goes there is a small black tab in one corner that shows you which way it goes. All you have to do after that is place the heatsink on top of the processor (Don't forget to add thermal paste if there isn't any already on the bottom of the heatsink, it usually looks like a gray paste. Your CPU may overheat if you don't have thermal paste) and twist the four locks into place to hold the heatsink onto the motherboard. After that you're all set to go and fire up all four cores!
Steppings:
The Q6600 comes in two different steppings. Steppings are the different revisions of the chip's archetecture to further imrpove efficiency. Now about the two different steppings: the B3 stepping and the G0 stepping. What's the difference you ask? The B3 stepping has a TDP (Thermal Design Power, or how much power the CPU uses in watts) of 105w. The G0 stepping has a TDP of 95w which means lower temperatures, and obviously lower power consumption. This also means that the processor can be more easily overclocked.
Socket Type:
As explained before the Q6600 and many other chips are Socket 775 or less commonly known as Socket T. There are quite a few different sockets such as socket 478, socket AM2/AM2+ (for AMD chips.) Considering the Q6600 is Socket 775 we will focus on what that involves for now. Socket 775 is different from other sockets due to the fact it has a "Land Grid Array". What that means is the processor no longer has pins, all of the pins are spring loaded on the motherboard to make it much harder to accidently bend the pins and require a whole replacement of the CPU. (All older processors have the pins located directly on the chip.) The "775" refers to how many pins the socket has to make contact between the motherboard and the CPU. Due to Socket 775 having more pins that most other sockets it provides better power distribution to the processor, which means your system is more stable especially when overclocking.
Performance:
When using multithreaded applications (Applications that can use more than one core at the same time) the Q6600 provides extremely fast calculations, but even if the program is not multithreaded it still provides extremely fast speeds. Even better performance than those of faster pentium 4 chips due to superior archetechture which maximizes the efficiency of transferring and calculating data. The Q6600 is the perfect chip for gamers and enthusiasts alike due to it's speed, large cache, four cores and great overclocking potential. Games will run at full speed with no hitches, feel like encoding that DVD you like so much so you can watch it on your PC? No problem. The Q6600 will do that faster than almost all other CPU's. The Q6600 really is one of the best performing chips you can get.
Conclusion:
In conclusion the Q6600 has to be the best chip you could possibly buy. It's cheap, fast and provides more potential than first meets the eye for those who wish to unlock it's true power. A must have for anybody who wants the most out of their PC.