Originally Posted by *The.Doctor (Post 5256516)

That's not really a fair comparison though. Your talking about a newer 45nm dual core compared to a older 65nm quad core. The Q6600 is a good OC'er, it just requires more volts than a 45nm chip to hit high speeds. Most people i see with Q6600s have them around 3.4-3.6Ghz 24/7, which is still pretty good considering your not going to notice the difference between 3.6 and 4.0 unless your looking at benchmark scores or running a SLI / CF setup.

You also have to consider that its a quad core, which means it will actually be better than a higher clocked dual core in apps and games that have good multi-core support, and it will multi-task better. Even in games that are not well optimized for multi-core CPU's you can see a little boost. I benchmarked my own system after i got my quad (X3350 aka Q9450) clocked at 3.70Ghz against my E3110 aka E8400 @ 4.3Ghz and guess what, the quad produced better minimum framerates in everything despite being clocked 600Mhz slower.