Amazon is only shipping the Q6600 with confirmed BX80562Q6600 SLACR, with G0 stepping
Intel wide dynamic and quad-core processor
Intel smart memory access
Intel advanced smart cache
Intel advanced digital media boost
Rating: - Well valued price!
I installed into a Dell XPS410 and it was recognized immediatly by bios.
G0 stepping SLACR, computer runs on one processor most of the time and scales up when work load increases. Noticable improvement, recommend over any other processor for XPS410. Have owned for 30 days.
Rating: - Best bang for buck
Bought at New Egg for 289.99 about 9 months ago. Overclocked to 3.22 Ghz and runs 30Cish core idle and 50Cish full load all cores. Needs a better heatsink but other than that its perfect for money.
The product shipped quickly and I had no issues with the CPU. The fan however was broken and did not register with the motherboard. Unfortunately, the $2 fan could not be replaced without shipping the entire package back. It just wasn't worth the cost and put me out for about a week until I could purchase another fan.
Overall, the company that I bought from was great, I just wish that they were a little flexible with their return policy.
As for the product, intel + broken fan? = :-(
Rating: - This is THE chip to get
So, I'm one of those guys who spends way too much time on my computer, doing everything from gaming to programming. A few months back, I needed an upgrade from my Pentium D 925 because quite a few games were becoming quite slow, so I figured I'd go with the newer "Core 2" line to help bolster my computer's power (along with a new graphics chip). However, what I got was a lot more than what I had originally expected, which was merely more frames per second.
This processor -- with its four massively powerful cores -- truly redefines "multitasking". Whereas on my old machine, I would always limit the number of things I was doing at once (maybe watching a movie while typing up a word document), there's virtually no limit here! I can play graphics intensive games while having a movie running in the background while I encode some of my latest recordings into MP3 format without so much as a hitch on this thing! The multithreading capabilities that come with the chip are truly astounding!
However, it's not all about multitasking. I'm an avid gamer, and for the latest crop of games, with their multithreaded game engines, this chip proves to be a beast. Games such as Unreal Tournament 3 and Crysis would crawl on my old Pentium D, but with this new chip, I see a dramatic difference in framerate (I can chalk a lot of the gain up to my new gfx card, but I benchmarked my Core 2 Quad v.s. my Pentium D on the new video card, and even then, there was a massive improvement). Games nowadays are becoming increasingly multithreaded due in part to the existence chips like these, but also because of the Xbox 360 and PS3 architectures which force developers to write multithreaded code. It's only a matter of time before today's latest games require at least a dual core processor, so with this thing, you're ahead of the game.
Yes, I'm gushing about this thing. But, really, if you take away anything from this review, just note how ecstatic I am to have this chip. No matter what applications you run, whether you're a gamer or an audiophile, this chip will improve your computing experience.
Did I also mention it's a great value and a hell of an overclocker (I'm running it at 3.3GHz)?
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