Is the Q6600 any good?

[Retro6]

I thought I would upgrade one of my HP DC7900 Small Form Factor PC's. It was working fine with the E8500 that was in there but I wanted to put in the Q6600 as its a Quad Core and I thought it would be faster.

After upgrading the CPU is was so much slower. A quad core slower than a Dual Core 2 how?

Windows 10 takes a while to start up there is a huge noticeable difference in performance its under performing quite a lot. I ran a benchmark which never completed 3D games failed and the performance matched that of a slow single core processor.

Why is the Q6600 performing so poorly in this machine?
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct...nt/c01570345&usg=AOvVaw2Mrfk2rTZmLzNS93AlUmh9

 

[Retro6]

I'm always a bit weary about BIOS updating just encase it bricks the board. It looks like the machine doesn't support the Q6600 very well. The Q6600 should be very capable of playing 3D games you can even play GTA5 on one of those processors but in this machine its not going to happen if its horribly under performing. Any processor capable of running GTA5 "just about" or respectively is a good processor in my opinion regardless of its age.

 

[Retro6]

I've switched it off but I'll come back to it tomorrow and download some CPU monitoring/ temperature software. The heatsink is barely warm so I don't think its heating up too much but more likely the BIOS not supporting it very well. Something is wrong either way.

 

[Retro6]

Should not be seeing significant Windows performance difference between those cores, except where multi-threading comes into play which would hand the advantage to the Q6600.

Especially if it isn't the G0 variant you may find the motherboard is struggling with the current draw demand of the CPU and causing issues - especially if it is a pre-built system with OEM PSU, OEM motherboard, etc.

I had highly clocked Q6600 and Q9550 systems side by side running similar hardware back in those days and for booting up Windows, etc. the difference between them was not huge.

That would make a lot of sense. I don't think the PSU can handle it especially with an added GPU as well. Even without the GPU its still dog poop slow. The HP DC7900 can't handle it. The PSU is very specific to the machine so its not like I can put in a better PSU not without a tonne of modifications anyway. The CPU software failed to run and the computer was literally crawling along then Windows 10 wanted to do updates which took forever.

Are you sure the heatsink is seated right / thermal compound applied?

Yep I always make sure before I fix the cooler in place that everything lines up and that its fitted correctly otherwise I have to re-do it which wastes thermal paste.

 

[Retro6]

I've been busy today so I haven't had the chance to look at it yet. I picked up two Q8300 processors today on my lunch break from a near by CEX. I'll reset the BIOS on it later and download cpuz.

 

[Retro6]

I've reset the BIOS, after doing so I noticed an increase in speed. Windows started up much faster and the computer is working better now and I've downloaded CPUZ and CPU temperature monitor. Hard drive is mostly always at 100% but I'll be getting an SSD for this. I only have 64GB SSD's left all my higher capacity ones I've used in other machines. I will order a 120GB PNY one in a bit.

Just out of interest how would I over clock the Q6600 in the HP DC7900 BIOS?

 

[Retro6]

I still play with old LGA 775 equipment, as it still runs I see no point binning it.

My daughters 1st PC (just to get her started before high school) is an old LGA 775 system and with an E8500 and 4gb of Dominator GT ram. I found it rather lacking recently just with W10, Youtube and general multipage browisng, so have decided I will put a Q9550 and 8gb of memory in there.

I am currently using a Q9550/Asus Maximus II Gene/8gb ddr2, it was a far smoother experience than the old dual core.

Socket 775 stuff are brilliant. They are one of my favorite boards. They can have a wide range of use from a retro Windows 98 build to a fairly "in my opinion" modern system. They take a wide variety of processors. Its hard to imagine that processors like the Q6600 Q8300 and Q9550 were released 2007/2008 I was still using Pentium 4 back then.

 

[Retro6]

The overall performance is still pretty terrible even though Windows started up faster after the BIOS reset. Bench marks were off the scale lower than low 3 FPS. It could be better. I wasn't able to complete the bench mark. CPU temp reached 71'C which is about normal for a quad core. I also got an error about out of virtual memory? I have 8GB of DDR2 RAM in this. I possibly could have a failing hard drive as its always high between 90% and 100% or could be due to Windows 10 constantly running processes.

 

[Retro6]

What bench software are you using and what are the results you're getting.

I'm using Performance Test 9.0 Evaluation. It never properly completes and I don't get the final results I just see some of them before it crashes. I tried another benchmark software which did the same. It seems to struggle when it hits the 3D part of the test.