can the Intel Q6600 run 1600 Mhz Ram

[Criso Antonov]

can the Intel Q6600 run 1600 Mhz Ram because i saw that in the intel ark site it can run only 1066 which is pretty low http://ark.intel.com/products/29765/Intel-Core2-Quad-Processor-Q6600-8M-Cache-2_40-GHz-1066-MHz-FSB can you help me guys i want to know if it cpu can run like this

Intel Q6600
GTX 660
8GB 1600 MHz

 

[Poprin]

Even if it could, which it can't... it would make no difference to the performance whatsoever.

 

[Eduello]

You can use 1600MHz RAM, but it will be downclocked to 1066MHz. As Poprin said, you will probably not notice the difference.

 

[Poprin]

To elaborate. The Q6600 in it's day was a belter of a processor. Now however it is not it's day. It still does perform quite well, I still run one myself on a secondary machine that my girlfriend uses to game now and then. But for example the lowest clocked i3 sandybridge would smash it to pieces. An AMD FX-4100 would smoke it. These are not performance processors. I would advise a CPU / mobo upgrade to match your 660 and RAM.

 

[Poprin]

Interestingly, a low clocked i3 is actually around the same performance as the Q6600 (sometimes the Q6600 is even faster).
http://anandtech.com/bench/product/289?vs=53

What is even more interesting is how little processors have improved in performance like they used to. For example, comparing the Q6600 to the current top of the line mainstream Intel processor: the 4770K... the 4770K is only twice as fast (which is still pretty nice of a speed boost, but not like it used to be). [I'm excluding the extremely expensive processors, which are obviously a bit faster.]
http://anandtech.com/bench/product/836?vs=53

I don't really agree with you, the problem is what happened was that manufacturers hit a speed ceiling around 4ghz. So then they started adding more core's... it's just software developers have taken about 6 years to really start taking any kind of advantage of multi-core processors. So yes if you are running a heavily single threaded task it will only perform so fast. Don't forget also that processors are now at least twice as efficient at performing those same tasks.

Also as for your i3 comparison I don't think that review shows the Q6600 in quite the favourable light you imagine. In almost all of those tasks, except the ones that are heavily multi-threaded, like rendering, the i3 is at least 25% faster. Also the i3 is only 65w while the Q6600 sucks up 105w!

Also doubling the performance of the Q6600 with the new i7 you don't think is good? If you had a Ferrari 7 years ago that could do 200 miles an hour and today they released one that could do 400 miles an hour would you not class that as a major improvement! Again not to mention that the 4770k is 84w so it performs everything twice as fast with around 25% less power.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the Q6600 is not a good processor. Even by todays standard for a lot of tasks it performs very well. BUT it does that significantly less efficiently than new processors and at best it's 25% slower than most performance orientated processors released in the past 4 years.