Q6600 in 2016

[Frosty96]

So i was looking into building an htpc using a q6600 as the core of the build. I was wondering if anyone could tell me if the q6600 is fine for 4k video or streaming twitch at source quality. So if you own a q6600 I would like to hear some opinions. Thanks

 

[LeKeiser]

Last March, I switched my loving Q6600@3.2 that I had been using for 8 yrs for a 8370 and I'm glad I did. I mean, the Q6600 could still compete when browsing the web and playing some old games. But for the rest, it would often be overloaded... Some web pages would push it to 100% and I would feel the lag then when changing tabs. I would have to leave it encode video before doing something else, again it would run at 100%. Downloading stuffs on newsgroup would also be a challenge, the amount of IP packets on the network were showing on the CPU graphs. I mean, it wasn't just CPU related, but you have to realise that the motherboard was part of the problem, 8 years also, and all the elements on it, the network chip, the chipsets, ... were all outdated. Still driver up to date, but...
So you can build something nice around the Q6600, but it will be as old as the CPU, and you'll feel the weight of time 🙁

 

[Ecky]

I agree completely with LeKeiser; I replaced my wife's Q6600 with an i3 not too long ago because it was starting to show its age in general desktop use, and had horrific idle power consumption too.

EDIT: The Q6600 is definitely faster than a modern Intel Atom or AMD Cat CPU, which is basically all you could get for a similar price, but I'm not entirely certain it would suit your needs. A high clocked Pentium dual core might be a better fit for a specialized HTPC.