Proficient or Bad Thought? Plus a Annotation on CPU Scaling

Nosotros set out to discover if the decade old Core 2 Quad Q6600 could cut the mustard in 2022, and the respond is a resounding no. Of course, this won't surprise many of you -- testing 10-year-quondam reckoner tech is a chip like comparing steam trains against maglevs.

Out of the box, the Q6600 is only skilful for a Cinebench R15 multi-threaded score of around 250pts. By comparison, a $120 Core i3-6100 scored around 400pts and the i7-6700K hit over 900pts. Overclocking the Q6600 to 3.1GHz only boosted the Cinebench scores to effectually 320pts.

Pairing the Q6600 with either the GeForce GTX 1060 or GTX 1070 is a bad idea. Fifty-fifty the GTX 1050 and RX 460 seem similar overkill. Given how much faster the Haswell dual-core Pentium processor was, we meet no reason why anyone would bother with a Core 2 series system.

Information technology's still possible to play games such as Rocket League and Dota ii on a Core 2 Quad, and so casual gamers volition still find a utilise for them however that won't require a powerful GPU so the combination is still non justified. Likewise given the excessive ability consumption and other shortcomings, nosotros would advise trying to pick up a more than modern secondhand PC. Likewise remember that now Kaby Lake Pentium processors feature Hyper-Threading, substantially making them lower clocked Core i3 processors, so there'south even less incentive in using older quad-cores.

Countless PC enthusiasts volition have addicted memories of the Q6600, but it's time to retire Intel's first mainstream quad-core desktop processor.

Moving past the Q6600 nosotros as well found that the 4th-gen Pentium G3470 processor shouldn't be paired with anything faster than the GTX 1060 or RX 480 when playing CPU-heavy games. The Core i3-6100 could at times do good from the GTX 1070 though information technology was never able to fully apply that GPU in the games tested. Still, the i3-6100 proved to be a decent pairing with the GTX 1060.

Soldiering on with its undying attitude, the 2500K consistently out-edged the i3-6100 and in titles such as Overwatch and Total State of war: Warhammer, the Sandy Bridge quad-core stayed several steps ahead. Considering how heavily the 2500K can be overclocked, those who invested in this processor six years are probably still grin today.