A Decade Later: Does the Q6600 Still Have Game in 2017?

Launched over a decade ago, the 65nm Core 2 Extreme QX6700 was Intel's first quad-core desktop processor. Though its ridiculous asking price of $1,000 ensured few would take the plunge, even with four unlocked cores operating at 2.67GHz, it was the fastest CPU money could buy back in 2006.

Fortunately, it was only a few months later when enthusiasts were blessed with the Core 2 Quad Q6600, another Kentsfield-based quad-core chip that sold for a less absurd $530.

Although the part was locked at a frequency of 2.4GHz, we were still able to overclock via the front side bus back then, allowing us to boost the Q6600 from its stock 2.4GHz operating frequency to well over 3GHz! By no surprise, it quickly became one of Intel's most popular enthusiast-grade processors of all time.

Released about 10 years ago, we thought it would be interesting to see how the Q6600 holds up in 2017 while playing today's games on modern GPUs. In other words, what would happen if you paired a trusty old PC with a GeForce GTX 1060 or GTX 1070.

We'll also throw in a Haswell dual-core Pentium, a Skylake Core i3, a Sandy Bridge Core i5 and the mighty Core i7-6700K. All CPUs will be benchmarked using the two Pascal graphics processors to establish some comparisons.

Quite a load is going to be placed on these aging processors as we test some of the most CPU-intensive games released in the last year to see if the Q6600 can cope with such a burden.

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