Intel's Core2Quad...Finally Obsolete?

[@BudgetBuildsOfficial]

If anyone else has any C2Q Opinions or Experiences, please leave a comment as I have been loving the responses from the community so far 👍

[@jurisjancevskis9076]

I've got a question wth is quad core water?

[@BudgetBuildsOfficial]

@@jurisjancevskis9076 We may never know. It has 0 reviews

[@jurisjancevskis9076]

@@BudgetBuildsOfficial ok

[@jurisjancevskis9076]

@@BudgetBuildsOfficial maybe buy it and review it, I guess?

[@szab04]

I'm just trying to sell a PC with a Q8400, 8Gb RAM and a GTX460, it served as a light gaming pc and as a movie playing pc connected to my tv, but i want something bit more powerful, so i try to sell it

[@skywaytech]

I will say I am definitely blown away by the usability of these CPUs. If you came up to me a few years ago and told me the Core2Quad would still be kicking around in 2022 I would not believe you. We really do need to find a way to immortalize these chips in pc part history for how long they have provided a solid budget option to gamers. Great video had many laughs and I'm extremely interested in seeing the extreme and xeon benchmarks you do in the near future.

[@ethand4784]

I'm still using one in my main rig and it's surprisingly fast for its age, everything internet related works perfectly and modern games either run or don't launch, but you'd be surprised at the things it can do

[@hartomos]

Well I still have c2x qx9650 in possession and i still used it till last year its a very surprising CPU if you ask me, i even used it to edit something on Corel draw somewhat ok

[@Nordlicht05]

@@ethand4784 I have the comparison to a ~ 2,4ghz quad and a 3ghz duo. I can notice a performance benefit of the quad when surfing. It's noticeable faster. From today on I switcht from a pi to my old core to duo in my arcade cabinet. Even undervoltet it. A quad was overkill in my opinion for what games I put on it.

[@skywaytech]

@@ethand4784 I'm already pretty surprised honestly.

[@skywaytech]

@@hartomos This makes me really excited for budgets next video on them. I wanna see what top spec can do.

[@gargru]

I had Q9650 till 3 months ago when I finally upgraded to 5600X on AM4 platform. Sold the motherboard with Q9650 and 8GB DDR2 all for 30 euros. Had my 775 platform since 2008. I now realized how much faster CPUs have gotten. Great stuff.

[@Paxmax]

..and uses way less power! My AMD 5700G machine uses only 15-25W web browsing/youtube. It'll be a few more watts when I put in a proper GFX card though, still on on-board GFX.

[@sihamhamda47]

You also feels like you're time traveling from 2008 straight to 2020 when you finally upgrade your CPU

[@Paxmax]

@@sihamhamda47 Indeed, "office web browsing etc" uses so little computing capacity, cpu doesn't break sweat, you seldom hear the fan spin up from default min speed. Where as my 2012 old cpu has spurious ramp ups every minute or so.

[@affordablesolarguy]

No,, its the 8 gig ram limit and ddr 2 that slowed the quad down, your just wrong. DDR 3 jumped from 800mhz in the ddr 2, to 1333 mhz in the ddr 3, and you can run 16 gigs of it, slight over clock, it beats the I3 easily, and competes directly with i5 best machines.

[@TheLucidDreamer12]

​@@affordablesolarguynot true. I have a Xeon X5450 (equivalent to Q9650) and it struggles even with DDR3. The closest modern chip is a dual core Pentium

[@gabrielalexismojicasantiag4085]

I won a science fair with a pc with this chip and an rx 470, the pc costed me around 125 with graphics card and all in December of 2019, it was an alright pc for the money.

[@Friendroid]

were you attending the Budget Build Highschooll?

[@BudgetBuildsOfficial]

it’s like the breakfast club, but we changed the name to budget 😂

[@kyles8524]

what exactly did you win the science fair for lol? making a cheap computer? I dont get it

[@gabrielalexismojicasantiag4085]

@@kyles8524 The project was called " how a 10+ year old pc can be used in 2019 with modern parts".

[@__matcha]

That's pretty neat

[@TimmyJoePCTech]

This video makes me want to go in the attic and get out my Asus p5e3 deluxe with DDR3 support with my QX9650 and see how much better I can do than you at 4.2GHZ. Maybe i'll make a video about it... some day :P

[@BudgetBuildsOfficial]

You’ll probably beat 99% of AMDs FX Releases on that beast.

[@BearGryllsz]

I'll gladly wait that some day Timmy!

[@crofty565]

@@BudgetBuildsOfficial leave FX alone 😔😂

[@IamJay02]

Pls

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

With that clock you'll easily reach 1000 points in Cinebench R20 and be able to play games like GTA V, Doom 2016 or Witcher 3

[@MsMRkv]

I'm planning to upgrade my PC from a Pentium dual core 5400 to a core2 quad 9450. I only use my computer for retro games, emulation, and storing files, but recently it's been a tad more sluggish than usual, so I'm going to upgrade the processor 😁

[@sobolanul96]

Try the 9550, or even the 9650. With decent cooling you can also oc them with at least 400MHz without any issues in the long run. They sould be fairly inexpensive. Tip: you can find them also in many old OEM computers

[@akashi2921]

Lol Xeon gang here

[@younglingslayer2896]

@@akashi2921 ayeeeee

[@ethand4784]

I'm holding a pentium dual core in my hand as I type this, just a tip though, check your motherboard compatibility, it may not work with a q9450 and you may want to go for an overclocked q6600 instead

[@Centuria-lj9tq]

@@sobolanul96 There is a big difference in the price. I always wanted a Q9650, but in every case I bought the 9550. It costs only half.

[@furious_gaming14furious_ga91]

The Core 2 Quad is the CPU that never surrendered.

[@A-BYTE94]

Too weak in 2016

[@sdaafasfad]

I feel like the i5-2500K was it's spiritual successor

[@skyblock_mouse]

​​​@@sdaafasfad yep, I think I5 as a whole will prob be the successor of the core 2 quad, they are cheap and reliable and strong

[@JacobJohnson-lh4gx]

currently watching this on my core 2 quad PC from 2014, so far so good as long as you optimize it properly. Like using useful extensions like Ublock Origin, H264ify, using lower versions of programs that doesn't require constant internet connection (like Photoshop) etc. I actually learned it from you Budget-Builds Official, from your old computer benchmarking videos. Great content as always BBF, I loved this type of videos you make. Keep it up man!

[@0ka354]

On windows 10?

[@canaconn2388]

Linux is your friend if you still use a core 2

[@pessoaanonima6345]

I tried H264ify and it didn't make any difference. Does it work well for you?

[@0ka354]

@@canaconn2388 not really if you want to play games...

[@explorer9049]

@@0ka354 then you shouldn't be playing modern games on a Core 2 Duo/Quad. get an sandy bridge lga 1155 platform instead, cheap and common out there especially on oem systems in the Europe & USA.

[@canuckfixit7722]

Just upgraded 3 units with Q9650s. Only need to stream 1080p 60FPS YT videos and they do that just fine. Should be good for another 6 years 😊

[@microcloudhd9231]

I use my old Core 2 Quad Q6600 computer as a file/media server. I built it all the way back in 2009, it has a 9800 GT, 4 GB of RAM and an 80 GB Intel SSD which wasn't cheap back then. I also added a 4 TB HDD when I turned it in to a server but for some reason the motherboard is stuck in IDE emulation mode with no apparent way of switching to AHCI mode so can only address 2 TB partitions.

[@hj-mr5gg]

I didn't even know ssds were available for retail purchase in 2009, nice

[@ethand4784]

wow, I started off with a 9800gt and 4gb back in 2016 when I built mine as a sort of super budget system

[@anomishfish]

YES! I have a Q6700 in my homelab as a file/dns/vpn server, and it works beautifully. I have 6GB of RAM, and a GeForce 7300GS (in case I need physical access). I think the Core 2 Quad (and LGA775 by extension) really shines in the budget home server niche; it’s in a sweet spot where the hardware is old enough to be dirt cheap, yet modern enough to be a viable solution with all the bells and whistles you expect on a CPU. Those 4 cores really go a long way!

[@lsso]

As someone who STILL uses a Core2Quad Q6600, I absolutely love this video

[@thedungeondelver]

Someone mail this mad lad a 9600 series C2Q, stat!

[@Omabatfartsbruh]

did you use the tape mod?

[@nalouzefr2368]

@@Omabatfartsbruh I think people used it the most with the good old 4 core xeons.

[@lsso]

@@Omabatfartsbruh unfortunately I never heard about this mod until now

[@Tube2097]

@@lsso What's this mod? Lol.

[@anarcy7777u]

No C2Q experience beyond fixing a couple 775 mobos back in the day. I would be interested in doing a comparison to how the challenging Athlon/Phenom series is holding up these days though. My first PC build was an Athlon based system because they were noticeably cheaper when I was building it

[@jhonnyxyz]

I bought a Phenom 2 955 95W a couple of days ago for just 8€ including shipping. I also have plenty of 775 chips and motherboards around. I would like to compare the two competitors to each other. I've also a Phenom first gen Quad-Core somewhere to compare it as well. The main difference is the integrated memory controller and for the Phenom 2 the L3 cache.

[@TheDemocrab]

Phenom II is slightly faster than C2Q clock for clock and overclocks similarly so it'll be holding up too, although obviously the six core option will do a bit better especially with modern games that can actually scale to use those cores. :D

[@foobar-9k]

@@jhonnyxyz Darn! A Phenom II 955 (95W version) sells for about USD 35 in my country :-(. That's without Cooler/Fan. No wonder I'm still using my Athon II X2 to type this. Edit: besides... my aging motherboard would probably melt if I try to run anything above 65W :-D

[@ubergeeknz]

I resurrected an Athlon XP machine recently and it was not very usable. For one those weren't 64 bit chips so you're now quite limited in terms of "current" O/S choice. And once I found a Linux distro which worked, it could barely cope with opening the front page of KZbin much less play HD video. The 64 X2 might still fare better, I think X2 had similar performance to the C2D of the time, but certainly not C2Q. It was undisputed king at that time.

[@TheDemocrab]

@@ubergeeknz The Athlon64 x2 wasn't as fast as the Core 2 Duo, but it should still be fairly usable with a suitable modern Linux install especially if you have a PCIe motherboard and throw in a reasonably modern GPU for video decoding. The Athlon XP won't work too well with modern Linux not only because the CPU is simply too slow for a lot of modern programs but the Socket A platform itself is the last "old school" platform (eg. IDE is the main storage access stnadard with SATA being a bit of an afterthought on later boards, there's no PCIe support or anything remotely like it, etc) where a lot of the underlying software required for an OS likely isn't tested too thoroughly with that kind of configuration these days.

[@petrkubena]

Please - try OC them. Up until recently I had LGA771 Xeon in LGA775 board OCd to over 4GHz (4,2GHz was quazi-stable and 4,1 was perfectly fine). These CPUs were great for overclocking and that's what made them legendary. You bought already super powerfull CPU and you got another 30% + on OC. Actually my first CPU in that board was lowly Pentium 2140. That had factory clock clock @1,6GHz. It ran perfectly fine at double that speed (3,2GHz) until I replaced it with second hand Xeon.

[@Jenci]

C2Q was legendary, I think it's time to say goodbye... C2Q has minor issues in performance when using a multitasking programs, it is always CPU bottleneck. The C2Q holds well with everything application (with SSE4.1) I am expecting newer program that won't work like AVX and other instructions.

[@BrunodeSouzaLino]

Very few programs even take advantage of AVX instructions, even today.

[@randomequations2210]

Im still using C2Q just new application requiring SEE 4.2 doesn't work

[@Jenci]

@@randomequations2210 SSE 4.2 requires minimum Intel i7 first gen.

[@Cactusius]

I have three PCs with quad core processors. Q9650 with 16Gb DDR 3 and GTX 970 graphics card.. Q9550 with 16Gb DDR2 and GTX 1050ti graphics card and finally Q9400 with 8Gb DDR2 and GTX 750 ti graphics card. It is perfectly sufficient for common tasks such as browsing the Internet, KZbin and playing movies.

[@Kraaketaer]

I ran a Q9450 from new till I upgraded to a Ryzen 1600X back in 2017. Nearly a decade of impeccable service, most of it running rock solid at 3.5GHz on a Hyper 212 Evo. Really great processors - though I think you're wrong in saying the specs of the three you tested trwqare that close, as the cache is extremely significant in a lot of situations. Nonetheless, great video!

[@szab04]

Next stop: The BSEL mod for the Q6600 and a comparision to stock speeds

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

If the board has the neccesary settings I would go so far to say try 400x8 for 3.2 GHz and more bandwith.

[@affordablesolarguy]

I run a core 2 quad EXTREME 9650, slightly over clocked from 3 ghz stock to 3.33 ghz on stock fan, runs cool for years. Can easily get 3.66 ghz but runs a bit hotter. Can hit 4 ghz but hot as hell needs custom cooling. I have a streaming channel and my cpu does incredibly well steaming on Fallout 4 with 200 Mods , people cannot believe I still use the core 2 Quad, but no one has the EXTREME 9650 overclocked, it flat out rocks, still good for anything on the right system, with ddr 3 and 16 gigs ram motherboard. Your experimental system i snot half as strong as mine.. The DDR 3 ram at 1333 bus changes how the processor performed by worlds.. On my current setup, the core 2 quad extreme is about to try running with the GTX 1070 TI 8 GB graphics card, to try and find the bottle neck. I don't see any reason to change from the socked 775 mobo yet, it can play any game invented to date 2023 the only limit being your graphics card bottleneck. Extreme geeks say it is the gtx 1080 where the over clocked 9650 begins to bottleneck,, will soon find out.

[@DFrankyVision]

Happy to see old stuff is still usable today, still using as main rig since 2008 my Asus Striker II Extreme with 8gb DDR3 ram, an x5460 and a GTX580

[@thekrautist]

I used to run a Q6600, bought it used for about 40€ as an upgrade over the C2D E4500. Plot twist, however: I did that in 2015 because that was as far as the budget would stretch at the time. Not TOO much later I managed to snag a hand-me-down Core-i7 2600K with motherboard and RAM which saw me through all the way to spring of this year. Ah, good times, when games ran like absolute derriere because I couldn't afford the hardware to run them properly. Is it weird that I kind of miss that? Before the E4500 I had a laptop with SiS graphics and getting things to run, period, was always fun. I remember needing a special tool called "Oldblivion" to disable shaders in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion just so the game would launch at all. And it would still run very poorly but I played the everloving excrement out of it just the same. It just doesn't hit quite the same way when you can launch a game, crank the settings up to maximum and it just works. I like the fiddling aspect of mediocre hardware.

[@LastMegaMan]

I'm really surprised you never mentioned the infamous 771 to 775 mod. But it is rather old to deal with and requires a bit of very careful work to be done. I rarely see anyone talking about using those these days

[@YahyaFadly-xt9nx]

I have some L5420 mod and they were sold modified already in my place. Maybe i bought them around $10 per item. I am using g41 and p45 ddr3 motherboard because it can run 8GB and 16GB (4 slots ram) RAM. So smooth though using windows 10. But smoother with windows 8.1 (lighter than win 7 for me).

[@LastMegaMan]

@YahyaFadly-xt9nx I'd like to see more on that. I'll have to look it up, but later. Honestly, my current curiosity is what would be the fastest/most powerful Windows XP build possible.

[@eupher2]

I went from a AMD Athlon 64X2 to AMD PhenomX4, I don't regret that. I had used a Core 2 Quad at a friends house and it ran things a little faster, but not worth $800. The AMD PhenomX4 9700 just blew the Core 2 Quad out of the water, in terms of price, and performance.

[@hardrivethrutown]

I've got a machine with a Q6600, I refer to it as "The 2007 Machine", something I've had around for years. Actually a pretty good system for Xp stuff

[@ИльяВитцев]

With the cheapest SSD (Kingston A400 120 gb) it boots Windows 10 faster than my 2022 laptop with an nvme ssd loading either Arch or Windows 11.

[@DUMBDUDEGAMER]

I've just retired my dad's "2007 machine." It has a Pentium Duo E2200 and it runs Arch Linux with KDE. It's surprisingly decent still.

[@wfmg7235]

i have one too! xp gaming machine with 8800 gts

[@struergymnasium]

Ah, good stuff. If yours is still running, perhaps there's a few more years left in my ol' girl, the i5-750. 2.6ghz quadcore goodness.

[@megafan0258]

@@wfmg7235 Mine has an E8500, 7900 GT, Gigabyte board and 4gb OCZ Gold ram.

[@Josue31627]

Hey you're finally covering the Core 2 Quad. Legendary CPUs. I think the Q9x50 series specifically still have the power in modern usage. The Q6000 series are usable in a pinch and while day-to-day tasks still work just fine, the Q8000 series consume less power, get less hot, and the higher ends work just as well. The Q9000 series are a good median. Unfortunately despite still bring usable as a cheap way to get 4 (good) cores, the Nehalem i5-700 series are a better (and sometimes almost as cheap!) alternative to get 4 cores and have an upgrade path to i7-860. Good video as usual! Always nice to hear your takes on these old tech.

[@MLGKid420]

2nd-4th gen Core i-series CPUs aren't very expensive nowadays too. They are a popular choice nowadays too

[@whitebeartigtig]

the X3430 and X3440 Xeons are on the same 1156 socket, perform the same, but are a fraction of the price. I personally recommend those instead.

[@whitebeartigtig]

@timmy ho in some cases it's actually cheaper. On auction you can sometimes get a H55 motherboard for less than £20 and currently the i5 750 at CeX is £2 and a 2x4GB kit of RAM will set you back £8 from CeX. Not too bad of a price for something that has a decent upgrade path.

[@nexus7tablet610]

Your bleeding edge q9650 8-16gb ram system can still function over a decade later. Even if time has reduced it to an everyday machine rather than a gaming beast. The killer blow came when software started including launch conditions to detect CPU's, even operating systems have started doing this.

[@csbassin]

Sometime ago, I bought a Core 2 Quad Q9400 to use in my G41 Express chipset system that used to have a Celeron e3400. It blown the Celeron out of the water in terms of performance, both in desktop usage and in Minecraft. The PC was running well and I was planning on maxing the RAM to the 8GB DDR3 limit of the board and getting a cheap, used graphics card (although cheap graphics cards here in Brazil are impossible to find), so I could play games like Batman Arkham Knight (with DXGI to increase performance). Suddenly, all my dreams were destroyed. I woke up one day and turned the PC on just to see my old, low-quality power supply faling and frying my PC, including my Core 2 Quad and the Motherboard.

[@NolanWayne-h9n]

Dude you went from bottom tier to top tier hardware of the generation what did you actually expect?

[@stickfijibugs]

This now 2024 & my C2Qs are still going strong. I bought a Lenovo M58 tower in a junk store for 25 bucks around 2010, originally fitted with a C2D. I upped that to a Q9300 (2.5GHz) & recently went from the 4x1G to 4x2G with Win10. Perfect, runs quite cool. I use that for all my work, web surfing, youtube & even writing this comment. My home recording studio has a tiny HP dc7900 mini-PC attached to the back of the screen, that I found in an e-waste junk pile at a university. Upped that one from a C2D to the cool 65-Watt 2.83GHz Q9550S (hard to find) Win10, runs OBS Studio streaming in H.264 & Audacity 24-bit recording simultaneously, with 40% CPU headroom to spare! Sound reproduction is truly amazing. They've been good to me for many years and I expect those two to be service to 2040 and beyond.

[@Centuria-lj9tq]

I really love the tests of those old Quads. I still use a 9550 with a 7770 for dailey tasks, light gaming and so on and it still works fine. I dont think any second about retirering the system.

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

Similar to what I was running for a while (X5460 + R7 250X, until it got handed down a GTX 660 Ti)

[@gabriel_1988]

Same here! It matches perfectly with a GTX 750TI! I also got a i7 6700K paired with a RTX 2060, but i like more the old C2Q for sentimental value

[@tiagomarques7149]

Still use a q9550 on my music production machine with many virtual synths loaded and many waves pluggins still rocks on recording and making my music work it's worth for many young producers who want a low cost computer with acceptable performance

[@sugaryhull9688]

I used a slightly overclocked Q8200 for budget gaming at home while my main desktop was stuck in my college dorm. It handled TF2 and Minecraft surprisingly well even when paired with an NVS 315

[@GoodGooseThingit]

The amount of joy that entered my body when LinusTechTips gave you a shout out was unreal.

[@FilthyCasual268]

Cache and clocls are 2 of the key determining factors I take into consideration when shopping for processors.

[@aquamarine2044]

Actually still using a Q9650 in my Asus P5K Premium Motherboard with 8GB of RAM. Dual booting Windows 7 and 10. Still working great! Also have a Q6700 CPU in my Dell XPS 410 computer with 8 GB of ram.

[@lmoraws]

i'm still amazed how my 14 years-old Q6600 @2,4 GHz works now in 2022. I using it in daily basis so far, recently i tried to find an excuse to change my build to some new one, but i failed. Thru those years of course i made a few improvments such as ssd, extra ram, "fancy" graphic card (GeForce GTX 560 Ti) that did the job. And still can play in modern games with cloud gaming services.

[@theforerunnerreclaimer]

In years we'll be like "The core i7 11700K, how does it hold up in 2037? Now, we know games these days only hit 12 cores, but does this 8 core chip still hold its own? We'll see in the benchmarks"

[@DigitalJedi]

I'm waiting for 15 years from now when we look at stuff like a 3090ti and the 6950XT like thr GTX580 is now.

[@Shyvorix]

@@DigitalJedi Nah, 2028 to 2030 latest lol. PC tech moves fucking fast.

[@theforerunnerreclaimer]

@@sur_shrimpster Girl in your pfp is the only female attention you'll get

[@BrunodeSouzaLino]

Replace that with the i7 7700k. It's the new 2700k

[@JPX64Channel]

@@Shyvorix not anymore, moore's law is hitting its limits, unless something new comes to the equation.

[@TheoDJ23]

Core 2 Quad processors from the 9000 series work great with a GTX 750ti 2gb. I recently built such a PC for a family member who uses it to browse the internet, Skype, office applications and games up to 2015, at 1080p, believe it or not 😆. I also fitted the PC with 8 GB DDR3 and an SSD for the operating system. 2022 and still being used and the person is very pleased with it.

[@KARAOTI23]

The very first system I actually built was back in 2008 with a Q6600. I kept that chip for 7 straight years and used the 775 platform for another year with a Xeon X5460, as my primary rig. Then in 2018 I purchased again a C2Q, the Q6700 this time and along with some really cheap parts I built a pc to use it as a backup and for older games but sadly I haven't used it for over a year now. I'm in the hunt for a high end sli capable lga775 motherboard though and I'll be hopefully tinkering again with the Core 2 Quad in the near future. A friend also has retired his good ol' 775 system with a QX9650 in it, so I hope I can build a new system with that chip!

[@andrewhamop6665]

My old core 2 quad q6600 is still kicking after well over 10 years of use in a Dell XPS 420. I have to admit, that I'm not super impressed with its performance nowadays, but it's legendary legacy is certainly something to be a bit proud of. I'm also currently holding the top benchmark score for my combo of hardware in 3DMark fire strike, so that's fun.

[@InfopeAlese]

This CPU is in my 2007 For-Vista PC(that my dad picked up from a deposit, because it wasn't used anymore) and it hold (yeah, with Windows Vista) the majority of the times games and with Windows 7 or 8.1(I have both, idk why) even Minecraft or Roblox. I really love how good is this CPU :-)

[@drunkenn00b]

The Q6600 was so legendary, cause you can overclock it into the sky.... sometimes it was as easy as lifting the FSB from 266 to 333 (quadpumped - so 1066 and 1333 FSB) which give you more than 3GHz on that thing.....

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

333 FSB gave it exactly 3 GHZ, but FSB 400 with 8x multi for 3.2 GHz always felt like a sweet spot to me. The right balance between performance, voltage and cooling requirements.

[@joeckyhim]

YOU CAN USE A DDR3 MOTHERBOARD WITH THAT CPU

[@DESYNC-47]

I still have a Intel Q9650 in a Dell XPS 730 with the H2C liquid cooler. Thing was a monster back in the day. It’s been sitting in a closet for almost 7 yrs.

[@Sunlight91]

I was fascinated by Core2Quad benchmarks, but then AMD released the Phenom II X4 955. It was cheaper and as fast as the Q9550.

[@Cds56]

I'll just say this. In 2015-2016 I got a free Q6600 with 8GB of RAM, and in short succession inherited a Q8200 board. I ran the Q6600 as my main system for 2 years and it was excellent. I eventually gave it away and still have the Q8200 around as a backup board. I only upgraded because I was getting into video editing and CAD work for school.

[@demonhighwayman9403]

The Q6600 was the CPU that dragged me back into pc gaming, it happily ran at 3.6ghz for about 7 years then was offered an AMD motherboard for cheap to replace it and sought out an 1100T for a slight improvement in video encoding. These days I have been using an i7 4790k at stock speed which is not great compared to the other 2 but I can't be bothered replacing it as it still works for my needs.

[@timtresch4848]

same thing, I got a killer deal on an Optiplex mid-tower with a Q6600/4GB RAM, and a pair of 1TB WD Blue HDDs, which was a pretty snappy system for dirt cheap back in like 2011 after being out of the pc gaming world for a few years and got a cheap used graphics card to throw in my Dell and got all my old steam games installed and got back into the PC gaming world for less then 200$, and got a good 1.5 years out of that system till I was able to do a proper gaming build.

[@Alakazam551]

That I7 would destroy a Phenom II 1100T in every single way. I know the 1100T has 6 cores (no HT though), but a 1st gen I7 920 - 4c/8t - was faster than that Amd chip in all the workloads that mattered, only slower/similar in some very niche workloads, so a 4th gen I7 with 2133mhz DDR3 available would stomp all over it hahah. I think it was the umm 1055T? 6c Phenom II i owned back in the day, could overclock it to around 4.2ghz, the I7 920 i downgraded from was waay faster - especially in gaming. I had just left school and had my first real job (and no responsibility lol) so dropped a bit of $ on PC's at the time.

[@rot_studios]

I've had a Core2Quad + 750ti system for soooo long. I got a super great deal on a good i5 based system for 200,= + a 1060 6GB for free, otherwise I'd probably still have that old system in use haha It kicked ass!

[@Weensx]

That 750 ti brought in more years to my q6600 also lol

[@FireFalcon]

As someone who thifts for pc parts every week or so I just wanted to say that I no longer find 775 systems, its only Fm2, Win 98 Laptops or Intel 478 boards. Just wanted to add that :)

[@ethand4784]

that's a sad sad thing, I can find them sometimes but they're usually just family computers finally getting tossed

[@FireFalcon]

@@ethand4784 Yeah in my area DDR3 775 boards were as easy to find as 1st Gen Xbox 360s which was crazy.

[@alanfitzgerald9026]

I can't wait to start finding these on the curb. The last "usable" thing I found was a windows Vista era and quad core, and not a very good one. It worked good for tinkering with Linux, and now it enjoys it's remaining years as a dedicated Octoprint server for my 3d printer.

[@chocobro7]

Been using a q9550 for almost ~11 years. Still in my work server to this day. Stays pretty cool too.

[@fruitsnackia2012]

i still remember having a core 2 dual dell pc and later upgraded to a 3ghz quad core and the boot time being way faster lol. this was my work horse for a few more years till i got a sandy bridge 6 core cpu.

[@madst4059]

Roughly 8 years ago, I remember being really impressed by how snappy a PC with a C2Q was. When my friends and I scrapped together a PC for another friend. So we all could play together that night. That machine is still chugging along.

[@LJenkinsEsqIII]

For my son's first pc I picked up an optiplex that came with a dou. I grabbed a q6600 from ebay for super cheap, tape modded it and paired it with a 750ti I had laying around. It ran great at 720p. I still have it running plex as my music server and network storage

[@ethand4784]

I'd feel satisfied knowing these systems would be living their retirements as storage systems, although not having usb3 ain't the nicest

[@hartomos]

Well you can get usb3 expansion card, pcie nvme adapter, pcie 10gb network card and hoala free storage server

[@yakacm]

I had the E6600, then upgraded to Q6700. That was in the days when having more than 1 core was still pretty ground breaking, so having a quad core was just amazing to me. I was very pleased with my Q6700, and used it for years. My path after that was 2600k, 9900k, and now the 12900k.

[@Jeymez]

and you don't even need the 12900k, 12 cores is overkill for gaming and multitasking. the 2600k is the only one you got right.

[@michaelwood9866]

I have a dell xps 420 that has a q6600 in it 8gb ram and a r7 360 gpu. Gave it to my mother in law so she could look at a 24 inch screen rather than a laptop screen. Works well for her for email web and media.

[@Bitwise1024]

Just completed a Windows XP retro build using a Q9650 and a GTX 760. I've never tried more modern titles on this CPU, but for the era of games I built this system for, it's an absolute beast.

[@benjib2691]

I'm planing to upgrade my late XP area PC with a Q9650 and GTX 750 Ti (from a E8400 and Radeon HD 3870). Seems like a good pairing indeed (will also need to increase the RAM amount from 2 Go to 4 Go, DDR2-1066 with tight timings)

[@Pidalin]

I have Q9550 with GTX275 (or maybe I will put GTX460 there) for ultimate gaming for games like FarCry, Doom 3 and such games + some first DX10 games, it's a beast. When you look at that jump, this HW is from 2009 and in like 2008, I still had some Pentium 4, it's totaly crazy that some more rich people were able to have this HW just a year later and play these games with 120 FPS on ultra. 😀

[@dmanbiker]

My sister got a Macbook for her Highschool Graduation (The old PowerPC kind), and two years later I got a Q9400. I upgraded from one of those dual-core Celerons, and wowee, it was good. Then I saved up money and upgraded my 2600XT to a HD 4850, and it was amazing... I remember I asked some friends on a gaming forum what to buy for my budget before I knew anything... Now everything sucks :(

[@ChristianRogers3]

The old PowerPC Apple laptops were actually iBooks and PowerBooks, not MacBooks. They changed the name when switching over to Intel processors.

[@Nintenboy01]

Even back in 2016 it struggled a lot with games like Rise of the Tomb Raider. I would say it was already obsolete when Intel didn't release security patches for Spectre/Meltdown

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

That comes more down to the game and GPU used. I have to upgrade the GTX 660 Ti I pair with mine because I'm constantly in a GPU limit in Doom 2016, even in 720p at lowest settings.

[@ligametis]

Well just don't use it for the newest games. Cheap cpus today can't even do that, but that doesn't meant they are obsolete.

[@bryantallen703]

I picked up the Q6600 GO ($205) with a eVGA 680i SLi rev. 2 board and 8GB's of 1200MHz SLi ready DDR2 for $600. Then spent another $400 on 2 512MB eVGA 8800GT's, for that good ol'SLI. Overclocking the Q6600 to 3.2GHz-4GHz gives it a 25%+ boost in performance. overclocking makes a difference on those chips. 8MB' of L2 cache helps allot. But NO SSE4 instruction.

[@SlickOnTop]

I still use my q9550 to this day. The 16mb l2 cache in it made it future proof, for sure.

[@theforerunnerreclaimer]

My i5 6200U had less L2 than that I belive

[@thendrx18]

q9550 has 12MB L2 Cache

[@theforerunnerreclaimer]

@@thendrx18 You sure it's L2?

[@SlickOnTop]

@@thendrx18 there are some custom versions with increased specs.

[@davymcmenamin]

Using mine in a hastily thrown together machine in a spare room office. I smartly had my main setup in a family area, and now I'm back at college part time. Q9550, AMD V4900, WiFi/BT card, 240GB SSD and 500GB 2.5"HDD I had laying around. Unfortunately I can't get it to boot with more than 4gb of ram even though the board is supposed to support 8gb. Works fine for office type stuff, threw a couple of games and emu's on there last night but haven't tried them yet.

[@benjaminrondeau3148]

Up until sometime in late 2021, my daily driver for gaming was a water-cooled QX9770 3.2 GHz (Yorkfield) on the X48 chipset with 1600 MHz FSB and 8 GB dual channel DDR3-1600. It was a quite capable albeit a little power hungry system. Paired with a proper video card, (I had a STRIX 1660 in it at the end) it's still a rock solid platform for anything that requires powerful single threading over anything else. The lack of hyper-threading, high clock speeds and support for SSE4.1 meant that you could keep one of these for 14 years which is a huge plateau that surely offset the steep initial investment. I found that the real bottleneck was the onboard SATA2 so instead I used a Muskin Scorpion Deluxe (quad SandForce SF-2881 mSATA SSDs in RAID 0 using a LSI SAS controller on a PCIe card) which gave me full 1 GB/s on the available PCIe 1.1 x4 slot instead of the theoretical 600 MB/s of SATA2. Overall, it made for a very snappy and responsive system.

[@Txm_Dxr_Bxss]

I stand by my opinion that the Core 2 Duo and Quad are everything someone who doesn't want to game actually needs.

[@user-yv2cz8oj1k]

The Quad yes, the Duo? No. I had to use one as a developer at work at the time and it was the most god awful POS it has ever been my misfortune to have to use, even old Unix workstations from 10 years previous to it were snappier than that. Thinking of it I probably should have swapped the CPU out for a Quad and not told my boss. 🤣

[@quan-uo5ws]

You have never seen a two core cpu get completely destroyed by windows 10 then....

[@Txm_Dxr_Bxss]

@@quan-uo5ws I've used Windows 10 on a Core 2 Duo, it's perfectly usable as long as you have an SSD.

[@carpwhisperer1216]

I've been running my Q9650 for years. I only retired it this last year. She was a glorious work horse

[@toxan8]

My second setup has Q9550 with a GT 1030 and it's very good. I played so many games with it like GTA 5, Bannerlord, PUBG, R6 Siege, CS GO...

[@GodSaveTheUnitedStates]

I've owned many core 2 duos and core 2 quads and I'd never in a million years think people would still be using them after 2020. I just recently upgraded my core i5 3470 to a Xeon E1230 V2 and with the games I play with my system I can definitely tell the difference having the extra threads available. Great video as usual. Love your work!

[@microbuilder]

My Q9650 has been my daily driver for the last few years...between having grown up in the 80s with REALLY slow computers, and the blissful ignorance of not having used todays much more powerful CPUs, living with a core 2 quad isnt too bad lol

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

Over the last 10 years or so progress has slowed a bit and demands for simple tasks has stayed pretty much the same as well. Chips from that day might not be able to play the latest games well or do modern render workloads in a timely manner, but they're still capable for office or youtube.

[@valentinmagureanu8039]

Buddy am și eu un procesor Intel core i5 3470!☺️😊😊😊🙂

[@user-yv2cz8oj1k]

@@HappyBeezerStudios I thought that, then I got an AMD Ryzen 5000 series upgrade from the old 2000 series, this thing is blisteringly fast.

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

@@user-yv2cz8oj1k oh, it's faster no doubt. games, rendering, etc clearly benefit. but I doubt the difference when watching KZbin or browsing reddit will be noticable.

[@fragalot]

I still use a Core 2 Quad (Q9300 Yorkfield 2.5Ghz) for all almost all my media/content consumption. Makes a fine media PC, and it runs my 9TB drive pool (NAS) too. It sucks for gaming, even with a GTX 980 in it, GTA V runs poorly and so I keep a GTX 550 ti (1GB) in it so it's fine for media, but it won't handle 4k media, but I don't need that since nearly everything is 720 or 1080p. Only issue I have is on Netflix I get an occasional video pause, while the audio keeps playing, but the video will start again in fast-forward to catch up with the audio... but that only happens like once every couple hours.. but it's only Netflix this happens (even with the GTX 980 installed). Twitch, KZbin and anything else plays video fine.

[@sircampbelltenson7297]

The slightly uncommon Q9505 has always fascinated me, I have one in my home media server now but it is quite staggering. It's easily matches or out performs the i7 920 in single thread and occasionally multithread

[@feelsbad1193]

I still have a running DELL INSPIRON 530 Q6600 Intel® Core™2 Quad 2 with and SSD and 8GB of ram. Upgraded power supply, GTX 290 video card and run linux manjaro on it. It runs nicely. Not dead at all. That was back when Dell made a decent prebuilt PC unlike for the last decade or so.

[@ethand4784]

As I watch this on my q8400 machine I built in 2016, I honestly think that no cpu is obsolete until it can't do simple non-gaming tasks anymore, also I've been thinking of switching to a q6600 and overclocking it, could an overclocked q6600 beat a q8400? I know it has more cache so that makes me wonder, anyway, long live the core 2 quad!!!!

[@GizmoTheGreen]

mine overclocked to 3.4ghz. most of them did 3.0 without a sweat

[@ethand4784]

@@GizmoTheGreen I'll have to swap from my stock cooler but I'll definitely try it out

[@10msplits]

What's the power draw, though? Like, this kills the appeal for me until someone can point out its worth the cost.

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

Difference between the 65nm and 45nm chips was maybe 6% in terms of architecture improvement. so at around 2.86 GHz you should break even for that, which is a joke for core 2 oc. In terms of what is posible, I'd say somewhere around 3.4-4.0 GHz should be archivable with both, but your board or RAM might limit you on that, and at that point the higher multi of the Q6600 will be your friend.

[@valiantdiesel1332]

I upgraded from an E4300, to an E6300, to the Q6600. My god, with my Asus HD 4850 I felt unstoppable in 2008! This brings back so many memories of tweaking the old socket 775 beast at the middle of the night, increasing the clockspeed a couple of MHz at a time. Better days.

[@crimecity]

Great video lad keep up with the good work ps how are you doing today

[@BudgetBuildsOfficial]

Doin alright, glad I finished up this video 👍

[@FunnyRaccoonMan]

@@BudgetBuildsOfficial quite a good one aswell, love me the videos on older stuff, great work

[@spu77]

Q6600. Still using it today, 15 years old and perfectly usable for office/internet use. It was really more than enough in terms of processing power when I first bought it. Never thought that it would last that long. The addition of an SSD drive made a huge difference.

[@williampaabreeves]

the Q6600 for £10 seems silly versus the i5 2500k for £15 which can overclock to near 5GHz

[@canaconn2388]

Frequency doesn't automatically mean better performance though, just look at bulldozer

[@bonnome2]

You don't buy the cpu. You buy an entire used pc with a q6600 at a local thriftshop or something

[@williampaabreeves]

@@canaconn2388 in this case it means a lot as 2nd Gen Core i series has incredible IPC for its time, with the overclock it rivals stock 7th gen i5s

[@williampaabreeves]

@@bonnome2 for £10 that is more worth it

[@terrydaktyllus1320]

You'd look rather silly trying to plug an i5 2500k CPU into an LGA775 socket.

[@Croesquared]

Hey congrats on the LTT shout-out! I hope your channel continues to grow and you make even more great content!

[@chuck2501]

The Q6600 has another trick up its sleeve. The BUS speed is set at 1066 but on most MOBOs you can block a pin that'll set the bus to 1333 making the Q6000 run at 3Ghz (rumoured it's original speed before intel nerfed it) I have this set in my mum's old Acer AIO that does NOT support Overclocking! I just bent the pin (in the lga socket) out the way! EDIT: The BSEL mod!

[@petert.w.reynolds692]

thats insane, ive been also planning on modding my old cpu, what do you think with the Q9550 that's bus speed aready at 1333 ?

[@JamesSmith-sw3nk]

I gave away my q6600 pc to family members who used it as a htpc for around 10yrs. They gave it away to another relative when they sold their house. It's still working today, it's been through 3 or 4 graphics card changes. (The current card is a gtx 1050ti).

[@jurisjancevskis9076]

Hey @Budget-Builds Official, I've got a question Why was everyone so obsessed with Quad-Core to put the label on random things?

[@younglingslayer2896]

Bc 4 betterer

[@ziuzz4168]

Oh man, the core2quad was basically my go to when i built budget pcs as a teen in the 2010s .

[@thomaswilliams]

The core2quad was never a true quad core cpu. It was 2 duel core dies bolted or "glued" onto the substrate. You can Google images that show this. Ironic that intel at one time accused AMD of gluing together dies. Keep up the amazing work dude. These processors can be purchased from cex in the UK for less than £5.

[@bestopinion9257]

Aka Dual (Dual Core)

[@WorldPowerLabs]

A Q6600-based machine I built for myself circa 2008 is still my NEWEST machine. Handles overclocking very gracefully, though for how I use it, I've never felt the need to run it above about 2.8 GHz for extended periods. I'm not into gaming, but it's illuminating to see how well it still runs many games.

[@dominiquevanwyk518]

Love these sort of videos, would be awesome if you can do AM3's last hurrah like the 1090T Phenom X6 Used to have one myself and always wondered how future proof the hexa cores really are with things being atleast a bit more multi core focused

[@TheLucidDreamer12]

Having used one of these (1045T), I can say that these would still be fantastic if they supported SSE instructions. They're faster in IPC terms than FX chips and are true hex-cores. The overclocking on these is insane

[@fragalot]

i have a Q9300 and it's running well as a NAS for a few years now. It started out as my primary gaming PC, but it's been nearly 20 years. Even if it's useless for modern gaming, doesn't mean it's completely useless.

[@beefgoat80]

I'm always fascinated by old tech like this. I fished my old Tandy 1000 from my dad's attic a couple of years ago. My brother and I had to replace a few things, battery etc. We got it fired up. Fortunately, my dad also had an old CRT VHS combo for the display. Unfortunately, all of the old floppy disks were corrupted. Nonetheless, I still have it, and I still love it. Oh, we also found the old joystick. The one with the super thin stick and a tiny red button.

[@braxtonbunner4990]

For some reason, I wanted to go down memory lane in an old core2 quad system. It is an OEM Lenovo Desktop that was recently retired from school usage, I scored it for $20. It already had the Q9650, and 8 GB of DDR3 memory. I only need to throw an SSD, and a GT 1030 in it, and it will be a full system. I am genuinely curious how the factory clock of 3.0 gHZ will be in modern titles. These really are some fun platforms to tinker around with.

[@ethand4784]

I got a gtx 770 that I revived with a heat gun in mine, I thought I might as well use a gpu that lost it's support in something that doesn't support those titles either anyway, before that I had a 650ti, I think your gt 1030 will be a good fit for the system, but if you haven't bought it yet then I'd say maybe consider a used gtx 760 or 650 ti or anything faster than a gtx 650, they may have lost support for some titles but those kinds of games can't run on a c2q anyway

[@hartomos]

Well speaking for my own experience with qx9650 it's fine and can do everyday task smoothly and some modern games somewhat ok and retro games smoothly, owh you can still oc the fsb the hell out of it with good mobo 4ghz is achievable

[@FullMetalFab]

I remember when I ordered my Q6600. Loved that quad core, worked great for the better part of a decade for me.

[@marcbusby3625]

The q6600 g0 was one of the greatest overclocking cores out there. I didnt have a single one that couldnt hit 3.4 and i ran most of mine under water cooling at 4.0 either step is a huge upgrade in power.

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

Biggest hit was thermals. Going beyond 3.2-3.4 got hot quickly.

[@marcbusby3625]

@@HappyBeezerStudios indeed it did, hense air was usually ok around the 3.2-3.4 mark but water cooling was definately needed for the 4 mark. The uplift in power available to you was huge though

[@8-bitcentral31]

I'm on a q8200 right now! I can say it is brilliant and a good upgrade over the Core 2 Duo e6750 for £5! Good old CEX.

[@VikingDudee]

2024 and the q6600 is showing its age, has been for years, but its surprisingly usable still.

[@hhleap]

I was using my Q9550 for some years and this is phenomenal! The fact that you can still watch youtube, browse web, and even play games with a CPU from 2007 is just unbelievable! I think that pc with Q9650 and 8gb of ddr3 Ram will work fine even in 2030! Im not even sure that my i5 8400 will live that long life 😵‍💫

[@NoName5589]

I recently bought a Q6700 for $8 to max out an old Dell Optiplex 745. I was very surprised with how responsive and smooth it performed even running Windows 10. Paired with an NVS 315 I had on hand it's perfectly capable of streaming 1080p 60fps and web browsing Perfect for being the Garage PC that it is

[@semicollin4517]

Amazing. It’s unbelievable how much longer CPUs can stay relevant as opposed to GPUs

[@davidshepherd265]

I have a Dell Studio 540, very similar machine to your Inspiron 530, bought it in 2009 with a 2.8 Ghz Core 2 Duo. In 2012 I found a dead PC in council pickup with a Core 2 Quad Q6600 which I promptly put in the Dell, and have kept in the Dell to this day. While the Dell is no longer my main machine, its still in regular use as my HTPC, and I give the Q6600 credit for allowing this machine to remain relevant to this day.

[@beezle1976]

Ive been on a mission to make the fastest socket 775 platform I can for about 10 years now. It's the most powerful platform that can be made to fully support an alternative/retro OS I enjoy ("Amithlon", which is itself a way to run AmigaOS as close to bare metal pc hardware as possible. Still emulates cpu for 680x0 AmigaOS software, so any tiny improvement is useful.) I'm fortunate enough to have modern gear, but a c2q packs enough punch to keep someone entertained for life. The ps3 and xb360 was a great era for games, and a c2q based pc is both very highly compatible with pc versions of those games, and offers a better experience than the console versions, so while it may struggle to deal with modern software well, it's still a fantastic platform for 10's of thousands of pieces of software. Throw in emulation and there's a nigh on infinite number of titles to choose from.

[@aquamarine2044]

Agreed. I'm Amiga user too. :)

[@poodlemeister22314]

My dream retro PC is a Q6600 with dual 8800GT's in SLI

[@kolinetheno3963]

Still running a core2quad Q9650 with a GTX 760 to this day !

[@NielsHeusinkveld]

I still have a 2008 Core 2 Duo, at 3.9ghz with 4GB RAM. It still does browsing ok, and I use it as a simple digital audio workstation with some VST plugins. It all works fine. It would do daily tasks pretty well. And the gaming library available with DosBox, emulation, or Windows games until 2013ish, is HUGE! Far Cry 3 ran quite well on it I remember.

[@poppasteve2976]

My wife's daily driver pc is a Dell Q6600. I put the Doom 3 demo on it when we first bought it, but that is the only gaming it has ever done. At the time, it was quite impressive, but as you say, this was fifteen years ago. It still does the email, document processing and web browsing for which she uses it just fine.

[@alidk5923]

I always wanted a Core 2 Quad Q9650 pc along with HD 4870x2. It was my dream setup.

[@Brosfight_]

My men got mentioned in the newest Linus Tech Tips video :D That's awesome!

[@jurassicpeter]

The Q6600 along with a Geforce 7 series GPU (I forgot which exactly it was) was the core of my very first PC, which was a hand-me-down from my Dad, this brings back memories. Knowing its still used in 2022 is insane, I upgraded from the Q6600 to an i5 3450 back in 2014, and I've been very impressed with the longevity of the i5 3450, which I still use today. However the Q6600 seems to put it to shame with it still being used 15 years after release. On the other hand I think this only shows that PC-Hardware has a way way longer lifespan than we probably expect right now. With how powerful current CPU's and GPU's are, I really wouldn't be surprised to see 12900K's and 3080's still around in 2040 and beyond. If a 2007 CPU can make it 15 years, how long can 2022 chips really last?

[@HardWhereHero]

I remember the day my brother upgraded to a 9600 or 9650 and gave me his q6600. I was astonished with the performance! He also gave me a nivida 8900, I was still running a GT 210 or something. He was the person that got me into PC gaming.

[@heisenberg4e20]

Really pleasant video! It's really nice to see someone talking about this awesome cpu's in 2022. Back in the days I owned (and still have) an Core2Duo E8500, but in 2018 +/-, quad cores was a must and I bought an Core2Quad Q9650 for like 30€ used, and was a blast! In the actual days, it's my father who runs that pc for usual stuff, and he does the job pretty decent! Nothing to complain and nothing to worry about upgrades. Was glorious days when that CPU's came out, and i'm still very happy to see them runing like a charm. My father is really happy with my old PC (MB ASUS P5E + Core2Quad Q9650 + ROG RX570 4GB + HYPERX FURY 8GB DDR2 + WD BLUE 500GB + WINDOWS 10). Thanks for this video Sir. Such great memories!

[@douglas77scott]

Right before the gpu bubble I picked up a q9650 pc with 8gb ram and a gtx 780 for $80 in Las Vegas...had no real issues with medium 1080p gaming, definitely better than my friend's ps4