An Aged Artifact

Author's Rating:

Pros: Cool, Overclockable, moderately easy to install, very good stock settings, long-lasting.

Cons: Six years old, heatsink is difficult to install.

The Bottom Line: 
Six years old and on a dying socket type, this processor will not likely be useful to many. However, it is very powerful, very cost effective, and very stable.

Author's Review
The Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 has served me well for more than four years now. Its high overclock capabilities set it above other socket 775 models. At a price of $130, it is much more powerful than other processors of similar price.

 Stock Settings

 With a default clock speed of 2.4Ghz across four cores, this processor has the power to run many intense applications at once. Watching a movie while processing text and rendering a video file? Why not. Since this chip rarely goes above 60°C under high stress, I don't find myself needing to limit my activity.

 Overclock Capabilities

If you thought 2.4Ghz was strong, you'd be surprised what this processor can do when you kick it into maximum hyperdrive. I myself have clocked to 3.4Ghz (a 40% increase) with idle temperatures of 35°C, with only the stock heatsink.While I've heard tales of 5.0Ghz clocks idling at 40°C with water cooling, I can only speculate on how short your chip's lifespan would be with those settings.

Installation

For me, this is a mixed bag. I'm quite fond of Intel CPUs for having the pins on the  motherboard rather than the chip - in my opinion, it is much easier to install correctly this way. However, Intel heatsinks are a royal pain in the ***.

The heatsink shipped with this processor has four pins which must be attached to the motherboard. Each of these pins is two parts - a white plastic piece with a forked end which sits inside the motherboard, and a black plastic cover which resides around the white piece with a thin black plastic attachment which is forced through the white piece to hold the heatsink securely in place. It seems like quite an ingenious design, but in practical terms I've spent upwards of an hour trying to install a single heatsink. The pins are the most finicky things, and when you have to get all four of them in without budging any of the others out of place, it is quite a daunting task. Don't get me wrong, it is a very stable, firmly attached heatsink/fan combo - but the knobs on the ends of the black pieces are very easily turned, which can lead to them sliding out of the white pieces, effectively returning you to square one.

Age

Released in 2006, I'd be surprised if any of these chips are still being manufactured or even sold. However, if you manage to get a reasonable price, or have a socket 775 motherboard which you'd like to be putting to use, this is still a solid investment. I've been running mine nearly constantly for four years and it's still as fast and stable as ever.