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About LinkBackswhat's the difference between the Q6700 and the Q6600. I can't see any difference from looking at them at scan other than the priceOriginally Posted by James Thorburn
Buy now
wait for G0 stepping
What's a stepping?
what's the difference between the Q6700 and the Q6600. I can't see any difference from looking at them at scan other than the price
Q6600 is 2.4GHz, Q6700 is 2.66GHz.
That's not a lot for the price difference.
heard the following details somewhere:
B3 Stepping = sSpecNumber SL9UM
G0 Stepping = sSpecNumber SLARC
B3 Stepping = CPUID 06F7
G0 Stepping = CPUID 06FB
TDP is reduced from 105 to 95 Watts
If you have knowledge about an improved CPU version before you buy it - why not being clever ?
When placing the order (online or in the shop) ... I'm sure they're interested to find out about the stepping of their stock (label on the retail box) ... to make you a happy customer.
And yes, please do tell us about your experience with the quad Q6600.
I know that multi CPUs are only as good as the programs written for it, but how does the performance compare with lower spec CPUs I wonder.
I'm not so much for multitasking, but would this CPU be able to assign a single task to the different cores in order to be faster alltogether ?
And if one or two cores are busy, are the other ones just idle, or do they suck power and make a quad an un-economic solution ?
Last but not least, I wouldn't overclock my Quad (yet) and like to know if current motherboards do offer to run the CPU under the given frequency ... to let it work cooler.
For example: a 2.4 GHz downgrading to 2.0 GHz or lower ... and if I dream a little further ...
from what frequency onwards / downwards could we use a passive cooler ?
I know that the performance gets lower as well, but I'm convinced it'd be good enough for most basic tasks (word processing, internet, ect) ... and for people who like silent PCs ... fans with variable speeds would go down with their rpms too.
If you're a performance fan - ok ... I can get excited with numbers and tables too.
Just accept that thinking the other way for me is interesting as well.
Please let me know what you think
The PC my mum uses is silentand it's wonderful for word processing, internet, ect...
It's a PIII 550 downclocked to 333MHz because the PII motherboard wouldn't run it any higher.
Since I was downclocking it, I was curious myself as to if I could disconnect the fan.... and it's been running fine for years! - think it runs at about 70 degrees after it's been on for ages. It doesn't have a single fan in it, because the PSU - about 200W, doesn't have a fan either.
Nope, but I'm banking on a pair of dice which can do 2.66GHz at 95w total being not far off the quality of a pair that can do 3GHz at 130w total (QX6850).
Early reports on Xtremesystems show that Intel are speed binning fairly aggressively on the Conroe parts, but I've yet to see any G0 Kentsfield retail results. I'm hoping the Q6700 will have decent headroom. A gamble perhaps but we'll see.
Already posted up some information on the new stepping here after doing some digging. Intel post these details for all their processors (well most anyway, a few older S-Specs seem to slip through the net) at http://processorfinder.intel.comheard the following details somewhere:
B3 Stepping = sSpecNumber SL9UM
G0 Stepping = sSpecNumber SLARC
B3 Stepping = CPUID 06F7
G0 Stepping = CPUID 06FB
TDP is reduced from 105 to 95 Watts
If you have knowledge about an improved CPU version before you buy it - why not being clever ?
It seems likely that with the Q6600 people will have to wait for stock to turn over before G0's become available.
I doubt many stores would be willing to look through stock to find a specific stepping, unless they are planning on selling them at a premium.
If a program doesn't use multi-threading then performance will be identical clock-for-clock between a Core 2 Duo and a Core 2 Quad, unless you are multi-tasking with other programs. You can see this in our Core 2 Extreme QX6850 and Core 2 Duo E6750 review.
At present you can't parallelise a single thread (other than, say, out-of-order instruction level parallelism, but this happens within a single core of any CPU since the Pentium Pro).
One possible approach would be to, in the case of a branch in the code which can't be accurately predicted, run both possible outcomes on under-utilised cores and then throw away the work done by the incorrect branch.
This would be a form of speculative multi-threading, but at present I don't believe it exists anywhere outside of research labs.
Any core, even at idle, and even if it was reduced to a very low clock speed, would still be using energy through static leakage through the transistor gates.
If you look at our review you can see that at idle the quad-core Core 2 Extreme QX6850 uses 16w more at idle than the dual-core Core 2 Duo E6750.
You could underclock the processor, the multiplier should be adjustable from 6x - 9x on a Q6600, which would give you 1.6GHz at its lowest speed.
This could also be achieved by lowering the front-side bus speed.
Running it passive isn't realistic though.
For 'basic tasks' I think people would be better off with a Sempron or Celeron 400-series. These could be passively cooled.
However if you like performance (or at least a high TDP) and silence - I used to run my old Pentium Extreme Edition 955XE which clocked in at 130w with an Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro and a pair of low speed 120mm fans as a media centre, it was near enough inaudiable at idle but in games the CPU fan would spin up.
Also they show that the G0 stepping doesn't seem to overclock that well anyway.
But again we will have to see more retail G0 stepping first before passing judgement. What I want would be a ES one though.
Surely that's not really a fair comparison though as that Quad-core is an extreme version which would obviously use more power than a none extreme version.
I think by that comparison he is showing that on idle a quad core cpu only uses 17w more than a dual core showing that on idle its quite efficient and doesn't use that much power, which is quite an achievement
The general trend seems to be the higher bins overclocking well, lower speed grades less so.
Since I want a quad-core the Q6700 requires dice with a lower TDP than the E6750 despite identical clock speeds, so in theory could offer more overclocking head room.
We'll see when it arrives.
Make sure to keep us up to date.
I've been waiting for 18 months to upgrade. I couldn't wait any longer. Dont know whether its 2 weeks or 2 months before the G0's start appearing plus any info on overclocking is both irrelevant to me since I have no plans of going over 3 Ghz and a completely unknown quantity since no one reputable has confirmed they are any better at it.
I look forward to a system that has 4 cores, each one around 1.5 times faster than my aging athlon 64.
Even if they turn out to be real monsters that are really cool aswell as good clockers, I will not consider that I made the wrong decision based on what I know now.
Last edited by badass; 24-07-2007 at 09:29 PM.
"In a perfect world... spammers would get caught, go to jail, and share a cell with many men who have enlarged their penises, taken Viagra and are looking for a new relationship."
i would wait for the g0 steppings
doing the same myself
I chose wait for G0, not for overclocking, but for the scary number of bugs in Current Intel Core CPUs. If you run a server some of them might be remotely explotable (and your OS can't do much about them).
I am hoping that Intel rev their silicon, and sort out the worst of those bugs soon.
Do you have more info on that?
You owe it to yourself to click here really.
Right forget what I said earlier, my mate has came round and bought some of my spare water cooling,case and e6400, and with some of my savings looks like Ill be going quad core on monday when it arrives, Ifeel like a kid on xmas now.
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