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Q6600 or Q9550?

I love my Q6600 too, though have been extremely tempted to go for a Q9550 E0 stepping.

12mb cache, 45nm goodness and not upgrading to i7 anytime in the forseeable future temptsme more the closer i get to payday ;)
 
Don't buy a Q6600, it is old technology that runs hotter and uses more electricity!

Once overclocked and left running for any amount of time and you will see your power bills start costing you more.

In a climate where energy prices are rising sharply it makes sense to reduce the power consumption of your PC . . . not increase it!

Q6600 "Energy Efficient" edition . . this ceased to be the case once 45nm tech was released, the Q6600 is now an "Energy Inefficient" edition! :D
 
fulcrumer said:
Has anyone actually got one? I would have thought they would have filtered through to retail resellers by now.
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As far as I can see most retailers are selling Q9950 packaged at the end of July.. E0 should be packed around end of August.. I dout they have filtered through just yet
 
Big.Wayne said:
Don't buy a Q6600, it is old technology that runs hotter and uses more electricity!

Once overclocked and left running for any amount of time and you will see your power bills start costing you more.

In a climate where energy prices are rising sharply it makes sense to reduce the power consumption of your PC . . . not increase it!

Q6600 "Energy Efficient" edition . . this ceased to be the case once 45nm tech was released, the Q6600 is now an "Energy Inefficient" edition! :D
Click to expand...

I know every little helps but the power consumption is irrelevant compared to others components, namely multiple hard drives and GPUs etc.

I think it’s hypercritical (and I mean this generally not to one person) that anyone into PCs should then be concerned about power consumption. It’s a bit like a petrol head not running a car because petrol is too expensive and he has developed an environmental conscience. Although it may seem like the ideal attitude, it's not going to happen .
 
Q9550.

I went from a Q6600 (overclocked 3.0Ghz) to a stock Q9550, and I do notice the difference - the Q9550 is a lot better for how I use my computer (many small, simultaneous applications / virtual machines/ Photoshop).
 
Big.Wayne said:
Don't buy a Q6600, it is old technology that runs hotter and uses more electricity!

Once overclocked and left running for any amount of time and you will see your power bills start costing you more.

In a climate where energy prices are rising sharply it makes sense to reduce the power consumption of your PC . . . not increase it!

Q6600 "Energy Efficient" edition . . this ceased to be the case once 45nm tech was released, the Q6600 is now an "Energy Inefficient" edition! :D
Click to expand...

Give me strength... the difference will be negligible, you won't notice anything on your bills. :p
 
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Admiral Huddy said:
I know every little helps but the power consumption is irrelevant compared to others components, namely multiple hard drives and GPUs etc
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Yes every bit helps and the power consumption of an overclocked CPU certainly is not irrelevant! Also the storage is not a problem if you switch to SSD or 2.5" Laptop drives (I use laptop drives myself!). If you really want a heap of storage space for your data then buy a single large low powered green drive!

The majority of 3.5" drives use around 10w just sitting there idle, the newer/greener 3.5" drives have improved this quite a bit (around 6w idle) but even these reduced power 3.5" drives still use six times as much power as a good 2.5" lappie drive or SSD

Same with graphics card, we are slowly but surely seeing more and more green features kicking in ala AMD Power-Play which properly throttles the GPU/MEM MHz and Voltages down when the user is chilling in Windows Surfing etc. Newer GPU's still use a whack of power when playing games/running 3D-Mode etc but that aspect will take a few more years to get right I hope . . . . as long as they can tweak the cards to use really low power when Idle I will be happy! :D


Admiral Huddy said:
I think it’s hypercritical (and I mean this generally not to one person) that anyone into PCs should then be concerned about power consumption. It’s a bit like a petrol head not running a car because petrol is too expensive and he has developed an environmental conscience. Although it may seem like the ideal attitude, it's not going to happen .
Click to expand...
You wouldn't be the first person to express that opinion and it is a subject I have given a great deal of thought . . . .

Looking at the future I think computers are here to stay and are becoming more and more a part of normal urban life. Most of the world is now serviced by computers from the world of finance, brain operations, traffic lights, the cash machine, phone calls, space exploration, etc etc etc the uses and applications are endless! :eek:

So with that in mind I do not see how we can shun computers altogther apart from leaving the civilised world and going to live out our days with a tribe deep in a jungle somewhere.

I conclude that it is possible to benefit from all the positive aspects while at the same time remaining as green as possible. As a bunch of consumers we have the ability to control what products are being sold. Fair enough the manufacturers can continue to produce whatever products they like but if no-one pays money for said product the manufactures will get the message pretty quick! :cool:

Richdog said:
Give me strength... the difference will be negligible, you won't notice anything on your bills.
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Nope I don't agree, for one I run my own household and I can say with 100% certainty my bills decreased noticably once I implemented a change of hardware and a change of habits. Fair enough that just me alone doing this will not have any global implications but once 20 million users join in we just shut down a nuclear power station (or several).

Lastly now I have saved money by reducing my power consumption I have re-invested the savings back into a top eco-friendly energy provider and am now running my household and computers on 100% renewable power . . . from a wind farm in cornwall to be precise! :)

I hope that this time in a year (or two) I will be powering my computers myself via solar panel so . . .

running a computer with a quad core clocked at 4GHz may be neat (I do see how its cool, I "get" it, I'm an overclocker too!)

but . . .

running a powerful computer that quickly deals with any tasks we through at it and draws it's energy from the Sun just seems waaaay more interesting to me at this point in time, what do you think? :p
 
Big.Wayne said:
running a powerful computer that quickly deals with any tasks we through at it and draws it's energy from the Sun just seems waaaay more interesting to me at this point in time, what do you think? :p
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LOL, for the 5 days a year that the UK actually gets decent weather :D
 
Would prefer to shut down a coal station rather than a nuclear... but yeah... as they say, if well all do the little things it adds up to a massive change.

I read somewhere that if all the traffic lights were replaced with LED ones 2-3 powerstations could be shut... haha. small change, big difference.
 
I appreciate the idea behind using 2.5" drives for desktop use as the power savings do seem impressive, but it doesn't really make much economic sense unless you plan on using the same drive for many years. The figures below are for 24/7 usage and even then you only save about £5 a year. Obviously savings would be much less for non-constant running.

HD103UJ (1TB, 7200rpm, 3.5")
  • 8.4W read/write £7.35/year*
  • 6.7W idle £5.86/year*
  • 9p/GB

HM500LI (500GB, 5400rpm, 2.5")
  • 2.4W read/write £2.10/year*
  • 0.7W idle 61p/year*
  • 22p/GB

*estimated at 10p per kWh

I'm not trying to discredit the idea of using a laptop drive/SSD in a desktop as if you've got one every little helps, but there's no point rushing out and buying a laptop drive to save a few quid on your energy bills for anyone that was considering it. If you have no big storage needs and don't mind how much space your system drive has it could be a winner though - 160GB for £35 is more expensive than desktop drives but if you don't care about the size it's a decent green alternative.

As for graphics cards, haven't they been doing that for years now? I know my 6600GT throttled back at idle at least, though I suppose they can slap a 'Green' label on it now :D

Back to the original topic with the CPUs; I've just had a quick look on the Intel Processor Spec finder and I must be interpreting the figures incorrectly. Both the 45nm and 65nm have a Thermal Design Power of 95W? I was trying to find some figures to see if there really was a huge difference but that was all I could find. Anyone got any figures that show the real world differences?


This topic does make you wonder how much power is being wasted - every overclocking thread on here seems to recommend disabling speedstep/C1E! I've had it running on my ('clocked) Q6600 for a while now and it hasn't affected stability, so hopefully that'll save a few watts of power for no extra hardware cost/disadvantage.
 
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