joemunky

TBH, the Q6600 isn't hard to keep cool what so ever, just grab a half decent cooler and it should be ok.

With my Zalman 9700, I hit 69 Load at 4GHz, and thats 1.55V with a pathetic excuse of a cooler.

The titan Fenrir should be good for keeping it cool, unless you want to spend a litlle more £/$ and go for a True or Prolimatech Megahalems.

Sticking around 3.7GHz with the Q6600 is a good idea, as IMO its a good balance between performance and temperature. However, this does vary differently between chips, but the Q6600 is almost too easy to overclock

Hope all works well for you

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Q6600 4GHz. http://valid.canardpc.com/show_oc.php?id=546163

iFresh

do you think i should buy a used one or go straight for a new one?

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Mozilla Firefox Club

airplaneman

If you buy a used one, find out what voltages/speed it has been running at for most of it's life and make sure it's a G0 stepping with a low VID. The benefit about buying used is that you can find out all of this stuff from the seller. If you buy new, you know the chip has it's max life still since it hasn't been OC'd but there isn't a way to know what stepping it is or what VID it is. I'd buy a new one if you can find a good deal on a chip that hasn't been OC'd too much and has a low VID.

Q6600 is an excellent chip btw, 3.4-3.6 is what most people are getting on it and that is plenty fast, and it is a quad so you will have no issues overclocking.

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Q9650 @ 4.5, 1.4 vCore (1.376 CPU-Z)
Athlon II X2 240 @ 3.71, 1.5 vCore (1.536 CPU-Z)

12523 Marks in 3DMark06 on my laptop

covertash

If you're on a strict budget, used is definitely a great way to go. My own Q6600 is used and has served me very well over the past year not only in gaming but also content creation through the Adobe Suite, especially with Premiere.

Q6600 chips go for around $150 used, but have been known to go lower so you just gotta keep your eyes open for them. If you can get a Q9400 or better for around the same price that would be great as well since you get the extra SSE4 instructions which Adobe products can make use of. Coupled with a cheap P35 or P45 motherboard or even some of the G31's (ranging anywhere from $40-$90) along with 4GB of DDR2 (~$45) and you have an excellent platform for video encoding that can be had for less than $300 if you shop around.

With 1TB hard drives going for cheap prices nowadays, ~$80 on sale, and current generation video card in the HD4000 series from ATI or the 9000 series and above for Nvidia, you're guaranteed to find something around the $50 area that can use ATI's Stream Acceleration or Nvidia's Cuda technology to further speed up encoding times.