Gaming on the FIRST 4 Core CPU from 2008...
When I picked up a Q9400 System for $10 on a used pc parts hunt I wondered if I could... well run any games in 2024? Let's find out.
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#PCGaming #GamingPC #Winning
I DISTINCTLY remember this being just about the craziest shit ever. This era was a good time for gaming.
I ran Q6600 at 3.6Ghz for 5 years. Even tortured it to 3.9Ghz~ with high voltages and temps to run benches. It never let me down and I gracefully retired it. Today, I still keep it on display on my desk. Godly piece of engineering it was.
Had mine doing 3.8 for a while too
I still have a Q6600 and a Q6700 extreme with numerous socket 775 boards. Also several Core2Duos and a couple of Xeon 5450s. The Xeons were actually socket 774 but you could place a sticker on the bottom to cover a couple of the pins, then rotate it through 90 degress and put them in some socket 775 boards. The Xeons were good overclockers even back then. These older platfoms were a lot of fun.
@@arneernestbirch9142 reminds me of my e8400 I had at 4ghz for a while. Back in its prime it was such a good chip
@@ants9230 lga 771 were those xeons
@@danielkarpati3196 You're absolutely correct. I remember cutting the locating lugs from the CPU socket with a scalpel so the CPU would fit.
The old core2quads were great, but what was even better was jumping from one to a sandy bridge chip, the difference was like night and day. I went from an OEM Q6600 that really, really didn't like to overclock (Wouldn't even hit 3Ghz with a decent Arctic air cooler), to a 4Ghz 2500K myself, the uplift was truly astonishing.
Tech YES City: Today we're testing the first ever quad core CPU from 2008, the Q9400. Q6600: Am I a joke to you?
Yeah and it has more cash memory.
😒👍 Keep It Old School
I did a little magic trick there and said 'one of' :P
@@techyescity Can you test a Q9650 some time in the future. They have 12 cash memory.
@@corneliusantonius31089550s better buys the q9650s still go for like 40$ on eBay the 9550s still have 12mb of cache and go for 5$
POPCNT error... I absolutely died. Why would you do that to us? Lmao 🤣
😂
🙂 its the fault of the people that creates the game engines, alot of game developers dont have a choice, some developers are diehard for unreal some prefer unity
Thank Microsoft for insisting on SSE 4.2 & above for Windows 11 24H2 development, then having everything and everyone else have to change up to the same compiler. Q9650 does sad face with SSE 4.1. Then relives the good times with Crysis for happy face.
When I switched up to a Ryzen system I re-cased my old i7 4790k motherboard, added an RX 580 and gave it to my brother. All these years later and he is still gaming the crap out of the old girl.
4790K is the best value for money cpu potentially ever though, put a GTX 1080 in there and you can still play every single game on max settings with 60-120+FPS (32 inch 1080P monitor personal experience)
Haswell, especially at the high-end, was a great architecture. Supports PCIe Gen3, USB 3.0, up to 32GB DDR3, some of the more modern instruction sets etc. I use my 4770K in a HTPC with Linux and it will probably be "good enough" for the next 10 years or so
Had the little brother, the Core 2 duo. Was a trusty workhorse for a long time!
Same with an e6750. It was better at games back then due to most being single threaded and the dual cores of the time had better single thread performance than the quad.
I still have a Core 2 Duo, in my old Mac Mini. I use it to run an old version of Garage Band with my USB M-Audio keyboard.
Had and still own an E6600 tho these days its on display
I ran the best core 2 duo the e8600 for about a month back in like 2018. It was pretty useable still back then, but I imagine it would be a way worse experience now.
@@bhume7535 Computation and clock speed is probably sufficient but its not going to support the api and other standards required for modern programs like avx and such.
My first Quad Core was a Q6600 running at 3.2ghz. Later I upgraded to a Q9550 and at stock speeds (2.83ghz) it could outperform the older Q6600 @ 3.2ghz. Probably due to the newer IPC and 12mb of Cache on the Q9550. The Q6600 had only 8mb cache. Still the Q6600 was a legendary cpu in it's day.
Always up for a trip down good old silicone lane. Loving this.
"Silicon" lane for CPUs. "Silicone" lane is OF content. 😏
2008 was a such great year for me though, got my very first IT job back after graduating, i can't believe it was like 15 years ago, man times really flies...
Sadly it does
2008 was a really good year for me as well, best year at my job I used to enjoy working at. It doesn't feel that long ago at all.
The older you get, the faster it flies. It's a genuine biological shift in the perception of passing time. To cunter the effect, it helps to do things which are distinctive, unique, etc. The more routine the days, the less there is to help distintinguish one week from any other, in which case they'll blend together into a mush. Special events help bookmark our memories - birthdays, holidays, memorable nights out with friends, weeknds away with a partner, a Saturday visit to a museum & cafe, etc. Living a more rural life also helps, for various reasons. This is why children and teenagers really do perceive long summer days as seemingly lasting forever; they get bored easily, because to them the hours genuinely pass slower than for their parents who instead become frustrated at what they can't avoid perceiving as time and opprtunity being wasted, time their offspring could use to do something productive. For parents in their 50s inparticular, time can seem to pass a lot faster once their children have grown up and left home, begun college/uni or started a job, or moved into their own flat, etc., as then many of the memorable annual markers are no longer present. This is also why financial advisors warn those in their late 50s who are contemplating early retirement to consider carefully how they will spend their days. Many find that the lack of their former daily work routine can leave a huge hole in their lives, they don't know what to do with the time they suddenly have available, which can have knockon effects such as depression, weight gain, etc. They wake up at the same time as they always have, 7am or whatever, often it can be so ingrained after many years; and then what? Winters can be especially bad, the lack of daylight yet being awake. It can be worse if career and hobbies overlapped, as the pressure of the former often helped drive the latter; enthusiasm for long held hobbies can fade. I recommend the video series, "Iron Age Man - the John Rossetti interview by Lindybeige", find the playlist. John mentions several times how the slower pace of Iron Age life seemed to make the days last longer, while his eventual return to urban life (covered in the final video) was a considerable shock, what he perceived as the crazy pace everyone around him was living. Makes me wonder whether those who lived long ago, despite typically lower biological lifespans, may have actually had longer perceived lifespans than modern urban dwellers, which if so would be a supreme irony.
Funny how you mention this now.. I'm posting from my daily driver Intel Core 2 Extreme CPU X9650 @ 3.00GHz. Still got the grunt for daily internet use. For gaming I run a dual 10 core Xeon rig (HP z860)
hopefully you got other uses for dual xeon because gaming doesnt use 10 cores let alone 20.
the extreme chip is a power hungry heat generator the non extreme chip is way more efficient, has a longer lifespan because it isnt using high voltage and can even overclock easier than the x. especially on air because it uses less voltage. the xtreme is only useful if you want to put ln2 on it and try to beat old records.
I have an old core 2 quad system that runs XP for retro gaming, but the board I have has 16gb ddr3 vs ddr2. It was a later board as the first core i7 CPUs came out not long after.
What Gpu did u pair it with
First Quad Core CPU was Core 2 Extreme QX6700(Month later they released Q6600)
It's worth noting that the Core 2 Quad isn't a "true" quad core, it's apparently just two dual-core processors stuck together from memory
@@burrfoottopknot And also we can say first true quad core was AMD Phenom(Phenom X4 9500 and Phenom X4 9600), not any from Intel lineup
My first gaming pc ( got as a gift ) Had an intel Core 2 Quad Q9550 8GB DDR3 Ram 4 sticks Rare Corsair DHX3 2GB tall and grey ASUS striker ii Extreme nvidia 790i motherboard it had a chipset that had watercooling named Fusion on it. A GTX 280 blower cooler A 200GB 7200rpm hdd All in an Antec Twelve Hundred case
Damn had my GTX280 until I’ve got a GTX980 at realise I did love the 280 Played Crysis 2 on High 60fps
The socket 775 platform was very generous to me and catered to my daily work and gaming needs for nearly 8 years. I had a Pentium Dual Core E2160 or E2180 (can't remember which one) that run on 3.0 GHz from default 1.8 GHz only by changing FSB clock from 133 MHz to 200 MHz or whatever. After a P35 motherboard died on me, I upgraded to a P45 board and kept the CPU and RAM. Much later, I replaced the E2160 with a very cheap second hand Q9550 off Ebay, and prolonged the life of that PC by another 12-18 months before I did a proper upgrade to a then-modern system based on a Xeon E3-1241v3 (the equivalent of a i7-4770).
3:24 Maybe you can use the tape trick? I remember overlocking my q6600 to 3ghz with this trick. But after a year my motherboard fried
Oh yeah I forgot about that! lol
@@techyescity not sure how well windows 10 would run on such old system since it's a heavy os and the cpu is old . Windows 7 works good and the cpu can run older games,old call of duty games,metro 2033 and last light even . There are some newer games that are light and can run on these old cpu's too ,but age catches on eventually . Oh and that POPCNT error 🤣 Didn't see that coming at all neither from the cpu nor from you 🤣🤣🤣
@@danielivanov930windows 10 will be dreadful I think. My old FX system barely likes windows 10 😂. After making a custom image and deleting a lot of the bloat it definitely helps. I even debloated my windows image on my new am5 system 😂
The tape trick takes a 1066FSB CPU up to 1333FSB. The Q9400 is already a 1333FSB CPU, so it won't do anything
@@danielivanov930 lol the POPCNT error :P, as for windows 7 definitely will have to make an install of it. I forgot if 8.1 can be made to be lighter than 7? all brings back memories.
Our family computer growing up was a 2008 hp pavilion with a core 2 quad. My mom used it with windows 7 until 2021 when I gave her my old gaming pc.
Q9650 user over here in the UK, running XP, 8.1 & Zorin OS 17.1. Nice with a Gigabyte EP35-DS3R, 8GB G.Skill DDR2 1000, a 2GB EVGA GTX 750 Ti, and a SB 0090 PCI audio card. Old games are still sooo good.
I would’ve opted for the Core 2 QUAD Q9400, given its standout performance among its contemporaries. If feasible, I’d pair it with a DDR3-compatible motherboard to harness its full potential during that computing era. As it approaches its twilight years, a robust overclock-supported by a non-stock air cooler, assuming affordable parts-are available, would be ideal for a retro build. This setup would ensure that games compatible with the Q9400’s instruction sets are experienced to their fullest, fostering a deeper appreciation for this classic CPU. Thanks for the nostalgia trip, @TechYESCity! ✌Peace out.
Love this!
Higher Settings tend to Lean heavy on the GPU rather the CPU, Lower Settings Lean more on the CPU. So if your CPU is your weakest link than you want a mixture of Medium & High settings (mostly High).
Your video timing is immaculate for me. I salvaged a Q6600 pc to use as a mame/fightcade pc hooked up to a crt tv for a arcade experience. I am not versed in retro computers and could not figure why I couldn’t get past bios screens to install windows. Gonna try your legacy method you did in this video. Thanks!
Windows? Why not try Batocera?
for a while (when very budget pc building/flipping) i was throwing in those cheap aliexpress x5460s and modding the bios firmware to run it on the 775 boards and pairing with a suitable gpu. it was pretty impressive at the time back in maybe 2018/19 what you could still get out of these systems and good fun to tinker with overclocking and seeing what they were capable of without sacrificing gaming stability. i still have a system like this I call my 'nostalgia pc' which admittedly hasn't been booted in probably 4 or 5 years. it would run games like l4d2 or dota etc easy peasy. love these "old" tech pc vids you do mate! too few these days imo ;). would love to see more. curious to see how well an x58/x5680etc system would do today in the right hands
7:07 Pudge: " had no idea " lmao 😅😅
Man, the Core 2 Quad Q9400. That's the very CPU I bought second-hand earlier this year to upgrade my old man's unused PC (originally running on Pentium Dual-Core E5200) and see if the old beast could actually game still. Too bad the motherboard is just a budget G31 board, which means not only it is stuck at 2x2GB of DDR2 max, the board is also most likely not that suitable for overclocking unless I wanna fry the VRM (that's if VRM quality does matter even on older systems). And I could only test less-demanding games because the only spare GPU I have is a Radeon RX 560, and also because of the aforementioned RAM limitation. One of the games I tested was DOTA 2, and the result I got was very similar to your test. So heavy, so choppy, no matter the optimizations I did to the system. I honestly don't remember DOTA 2 being that hard to run on older systems, considering my previous rig with Core i3 3220 from 2013-2018 could run the game just fine. Perhaps the i3 3220 was already faster than the Q9400? I think if anyone is still willing to play games on such an old system, it's better to stick with easier-to-run games (modern low-spec titles and older releases with lighter requirements) or 6th gen console emulation at max. Definitely not a system for people with fear of missing out.
I love these 4 core see if it can still game in 2024 videos! I remember the 4 cores is all you need era too, then it was 6 cores, now we have way more but there's a nostalgia there for making due with what you got.
I've had a faulty high end psu that a very generous man repaired for me recently and to test it and to make my inner lga 775 fanatic happy I bought an old gigabyte mobo with 4gb geil black dragon and a c2d then replaced by a q9450 from alliexpress. I paired the system with a gtx 1070 and it was surprisingly good. Doom 2016 100+ fps on ultra settings. I was even able to play Elden Ring but the ram was limiting the sytem too much.
Good thing about the last q2q-s (q9*50) is that they have sse 4.1 and 12mb l2. With a good mobo (p45, x48, nforce chipset) and cooling you can push these chips pretty far.
7:40 had me dying😂😂
Took me a while to get it but by George, it's funny 😂😂😂
Welcome to Australia! Home of some of the most deadly house spiders on the planet.
7:40 you could have saved all that time googling what instructions are required lol, respect the effort tho
Had a DELL XPS420 for 11 years as my daily driver. It had a Q6600 with a top clock off 2.4Ghz, given the locked DELL Bios. I used black electrical tape and cut the finest sliver of tape to cover 1 pad. This was called the BSEL mod and it tricked the BIOS into delivering 1333 MHz (versus the default 1066Mhz) to the Front Side Bus (FSB). Clock increased to 3.0Ghz, a 25% increase from stock...by simply using electrical tape! That mod worked for most of that PC's lifetime. It was not an OC for the motherboard, per se, as the Q45 chipset was the same used for the QX performance CPU's with that XPS420. When the PSU finally died, I put the PC out to pasture. That Q6600 was a beast of a CPU for its day, with a lot of overhead for clockers. My mistake was buying a DELL...tons of proprietary issues with that system, to include a BTX case design, locked BIOS, and various connectors and mounts.
Had one back in 2009 up to 2014, OC it to 3.2Ghz on P43 MB, 8GB DDR2 and an GTX 260, I loved this system. My dad used it till 2021.
I have used a Core 2 Duo Q6600 on both a P35 and P45 chipsets. They were problematic quad core processors but seemed so futuristic at the time :) Fun video to watch the old tech.
i think there good but with older games but i dont play games much im not good at it good one Bryan you always do good work
Brings back memories my 1st decent pc was old Pentium 4 quad core, it last for a good while even back then. Shows much the tech has slowed since the early 90's.
Heh heh.. I was the first kid on the block with a 386.. (parents died and left me a house.. lol) Even had 16MB's of ram !!!!! .. Those were the days..
P4 where single or dual cores CPUs unless u had a dual socket Xeon system
@@thomasdorey3296Yes your right! Thinking about it I'm totally wrong, I'm getting the hyperthreading mixed up! Need more coffee.
@@thomasdorey3296 And the dual core P4's were Pentium D
@@PaulaXism Building system back then was more excited for sure, 386 is a little before my time :P, (think i was still in atari st territory) my 1st pc was 133mhz Pentium, I remember all the jumpers etc having to be set for processors and all the IQR conflicts
I had a tower that I put a core2quad in with a rx570 gpu n it would only take 8gb ram but it played esport titles pretty well.
The Q6600 was the first Quad Core consumer CPU.
Yes, in 2007
I have a Q6700 and Q9400 quadcore CPUs. My system with the Q6700 was upgraded in Jan, 2019 and my ram was combined into my Q9400 system with 8GB DDR2 6400 RAM, GTX960 2GB and a 256GB SSD. That system was retired in mid to late 2021. It is still fully assembled but not powered up. Keeping as retro PC.
I use a Core 2 Quad Q8200 in my NAS. An old HP MediaSmart EX495. I installed openmediavault and docker and serves as my Jellyfin server. It's been phenominal.
I love old pc parts their so cool
aside from the heatpipe snakes, I really don't miss LGA775 lol
this is better content , i love it !!! everyone loves retro !!
Bannerlord! Wow Brian! Great game i'm playing on a 5700x with a 2080ti... limited to 140fps, pretty good
Ahhh... Memories. My first Quad Core CPU, which I've upgraded from an E8500... I had my old and trusty ASUS EAH HD 7850 TOP 512 MB work well with that CPU, also.
Cheers Bri. I brought a hp machine ages ago for a deal with a 8400 c2q. Told the guy I was going to Put a graphics card in and stuff. He was kinda surprised but I added SSD and a 560 ti i think and got 8GB working and now it' my brothers with a 750 ti. The windows just needs to be MBR so you might need a legacy windows installer as I built it when the preview was just out.
Wait, I had the first first quad back in the day and it was the Kensfield QX6800 in a Dell XPS. Lasted me till Haswell.
Man, last time I used a Core2Quad was back in 2013. I just dropped out of Uni, had to sell my 2600k rig to get by and the old Fujitsu workstation was kinda like the Nanny. 😄 Flipped it to a friend half year later.
So much nostalgy. I switched from Gigabyte EP45 DS3L-R to lga 2011 in 2019. Was a huge upgrade. Btw we used old C2Q Xeon processors in LGA 775 mobos. I used L5410 @3.08 Ghz with 4x2 Gb DDR2 @ 844MHz. Later I just bought an Asus P5Q-E which was much better for OC. Xeon E5450 can easily run at 4GHz in that board. As I remember GTA V was playable with GTX 750Ti. I will keep that build for the future hence it served me since 2011. :).
I had the Xeon X3360 which was similar but had more cache, back then we all thought the Xeon's were better binned and could overclock better lol (no idea if that was true or not). I think I paired it with the Zalman CNPS9500 (yeah, I didn't even have to google that model I somehow knew it from heart). My previous system was the Athlon X2 with a DFI lanparty mobo, to this day I'm still using one of those disgusting flouro yellow SATA cables from the DFI hahaha.
DFI were the dogs back then.
We have a similar hardware history. I ran a DFI LanParty NF4 SLI-DR Expert with an X2 3800+ @ 2.6GHz, but retired that build with an Opteron 170 @ 3.1GHz. Also swapped out a Q6600 @ 3.7GHz for a Xeon X3360 @ 4.3GHz near the end of the LGA775 era, and ran all my chips on custom water since 2004 (still using the same 19 year old D5 pump in my current build). The Xeon only benched about 15% better than the Q6600 but it was upwards of 20% faster in games, the extra cache helped it a lot in games apparently. I always enjoyed the people commenting on both my Opteron and Xeon builds "why are you using server CPUs to game? Server chips don't run games well." then getting angry and calling BS when they realize my "server CPU" was putting out higher FPS than their "gaming CPU." lol Good times.
I had a Q6600 running at 3.2Ghz stable with a Zalman air cool, 8GB DDR2 and a GTX 660 2GB for a short while in 2016. It did surprisingly well for what I was throwing at it. Kept everything at 1080p Medium/High settings just fine.
Core 2 became obsolete very fast in it's time... The jump to Nehalem and Sandy Bridge after that was enormous by today standards. Even then, in last 2 years it became hard to recommend even the 2500K that has troubles keeping even 30fps in recent demanding titles. Still you can say 2500k is not dead just yet. But Core2 certainly is long dead for gaming.
7:40 You Aussie madlad lol
Nice error :D
We need a new 2 core cpu. We need a 6.0ghz overclockable zen5 cpu with 3d vcache. It would really be interesting to see which old 6 core or 4 core cpus would match it in performamce. 🤔 Give is this content! I would watch for sure.
I have a Q9650, that I got for my 2009 HP Pavilion. I ran it with a GTX 460 and wanted to OC it and try out SLI, so I bought an XFX 750i (Extreme Edition) nForce Motherboard. I got to run at 3.6 Ghz and paired a couple of Palit GTX 460 (Sonic OC Edition) 1GB video cards. It was rock solid for about 6 months, when a lightning storm took out my router and the motherboard. XFX sent a replacement board and it was not soon after I got that board that keep that 3.6 Ghz degraded down to 3.3 and finally had to run it at stock. I'm thinking that FSB voltage may have been the downfall of Over-clocking my Q9650. I ended up putting it back in that Pavilion and putting together a very affordable 2500K rig to replace it. I still have that old Pavilion, which I use for older games and office work.
I had a Core 2 Duo, it was lovely paired with 8gb of ram and a GT730 :D
A Q8300 is my daily driver. I use it to administer websites and play strategy games like Hearts of Iron. The Windows 7 installation was imported from another machine. The only problem I had was removing files specific to the previous motherboard.
I built one of those with winxp/w98 dual boot for a retro machine. The mobo that I used had a pcie and an agp gpu slot so I used the agp for w98 compatibility. That being said xp is good with pcie gpus. There is a group of customers that look for machines like this.
I had been playing gtaV on a machine (q9550) with that spec (it was played on 720p). Installing win7 on sata ssd, I didnt get the problem you mentioned. The mobo was gigabyte GA-EP31-DS3L and the gpu was GTX275. 2x2gb ddr2 was enough for gta5 on win 7. So yeah, i guess all you need is powerful gpu. Perhaps you should have installed the rtx there X-P Lucky fellas. Where im from, a used 4790 is still over 50 u.s bucks. I would love to rebuild the last powerful spec system for my win 7. But, i ve heard that even the 7th gen intel (Z270 mobo) still can support the win 7 with native drivers. So, i guess, im gonna visit the mobo vendors home pages to see whether their z270 mobo support chipset drivers of win 7.
2008, later that year the Amazing X58 platform was lauched. That platform can still game. Just did a i7-930 build (Easy breezy OC to 3.5 GHz). 12 Gigs of Triple-ch DDR3-1600. Added GTX 970, and that's a great fit for making a very cheap entry gaming PC. But for X58 to better keep up today, the 6c/12t CPU's is the way to go (cheap Xeons). It lacks AVX instuctons, so SOME games will struggle a bit. But you can often find dirt chep X58 PC's, and fun fact is, I've not experienced a faulty X58 motherboard yet. They are built really well (caps / VRM quality etc). Building a PC on a 15 year old platform and tweaking it to run modern titles well, gives you some satisfaction. The triple channel memory config, do help in modern games, that utilize memory speed. DDR3-1600 @triple-ch = DDR4-2400 in bandwitdh, but lower latencies.
You can actually use Speedfan on some older boards to change FSB and/or multiplier on the fly from within Windows. I used it years ago on an old Abit board with an AMD Athlon. It was a budget board with no OC options in the BIOS. Depending on the board, you might even be able to step frequency up or down depending on CPU load.
I tried SetFSB software at the time, but switched to the BSEL (tape) mod as SetFSB configuration had to be redone after every power down. That program had a drop down menu, which listed the model number corresponding to a specific chip on the motherboard. My DELL motherboard worked with one of those presets. One would have to locate the relevant chip to find the right model number and then configure the program by selecting that model from the drop-down menu. I stopped using SetFSB as the BSEL mod only had to be done once...and the OC was more substantial.
You had to install Windows using an MBR installation (easily achievable with Rufus). I still have 2 LGA775 systems around with modded Xeons (use them mainly for DOS environment HDD check and repair softwares) Also, LGA775 DDR2 boards support only 8gb max RAM
Just gave my father my old q9550 cpu and p45 gigabyte mothergboard with 8gb ddr2. He uses it to this day for just normal internet browsing and youtube. Fully good working experience for him. I had that thing overclocked to 3.6Ghz for 10 years it never failed me. I even forced windows 11 on the ssd for the system and he has zero issues
just wait until a Windows 11 update from Microsoft requires POPCNT or SSE 4.2, or AVX... then BAM... ISSUES. Seriously, with hardware this old, I don't understand why you wouldn't just run (some stable, unexciting version of) Linux. That's all you need for internet/KZhead. Actually it'll do a whole lot more, but honestly, why Windows 11 on such an old platform? You're just waiting for it to be patched to obsolescence. Same would apply for rolling-release distros (which I'm running, but on hardware that is a lot newer (Haswell) so I'm not worried).
You can overclock to 3GHZ using the BSEL hardware mod! It forces fsb speed to the next step up. I have done it on workstations with this exact CPU. Best part is it does not change ram pci or southbridge timings at all - only the cpu. you just cover a couple pads on the cpu. It's that easy and it's rock solid. It's very stable on most q6600s.
I still have a few S775 systems. Including the crazy Gigabyte GA-EP45-DQ6 and a modded Xeon X5470 @ 4Ghz. That thing still does very well.
Hey @Tech YES City you can still overclock your cpu not sure if you know this but you can actually use Legacy windows to your advantage by using its built in "Legacy bios" you can easily access it and if you don't know how there are tutorials on YT on how to access it from your OS. Legacy bios has all the features that you would need in order to overclock anything in your system and is normally used in older hardware where motherboards lack certain features. You should try it out because you can still get to that 3.2Gz on your cpu.
When Core2Duo E8400 or Core2Quad Q6600 was the upgrade to get you that tiny bit more FPS in COD1, good times.
there is just something beneficial about getting the most out of an old system...even if it doesn't have a practical day-to-day purpose...
Had a Q8200 core 2 quad - did not overclock well. Lasted though in my HTPC until a couple of years ago. Only supported 6400 DDR2 up to 8 GB. Battlefield 3 caused me to upgrade (more macro stuttering than micro). So gaming rig was upgraded to an I7 3770.
Btw is that 4gb ddr2 kit you have a ecc ddr2 because of that chip in the middle or is that just a power distribution chip?
Hey Mr. Tech YES Man! You can use a tape mod to overclock these Core 2 Quads. I specifically even remember watching you years ago do the LGA771 to 775 mod. Turns out the LGA771 Xeons can be overclocked with more tape too. And for unsupported titles, use "Intel SDE". It's a good way to emulate instructions for titles which worked for me playing Cyberpunk 2077 with the FSR3Mod at 44fps(AMD GPU) to 51fps(Nvidia GPU) average. I mainly use Linux Mint on a LGA775 motherboard with a LGA771 Xeon x3323 at 3.0Ghz with the tape mod, 8gb(4x2gb) DDR2 667mhz, Maxtor 10,000rpm 160GB HDD, and switching between a RX 560D 2gb and GTX 1050 2gb. I still use Intel SDE on it in Linux Mint for modern titles. Stuff that is mutiplayer or with Anticheat software just won't work. But you can be shocked what can work. Mainly it is stuff that used to have instruction support, but was dropped later on like Cyberpunk 2077 or for other Red Dead Redemption 2. I just use it as my test bed and always something to mess with. It has held up for me way, WAY more than usual. I say around a decade or more. For something others wanted to throw away. I have gotten great use out of it. Out of all system for me, it has been the best. Now, I still agree with you. It is very outdated. It is a power hungry beast when overclocked with tape. Spare parts are hard to come by. Etc. And from my experience running any, ANY Windows OS even XP is so darn slow even when I one threw a SSD inside it. Windows just bogs down on the Core 2 Quads. It's never fun. But as a Linux user with a Core 2 Quad, it runs great even on a 10,000rpm HDD with Linux's default ram caching enabled. But my gosh, I have crashed systems running programs on even my Ryzen systems. But for some darn reason. My system just grits its teeth and delivers. It will take forvever. Yet, it hasn't failed me. And I will continue to keep using it til it drops. Best test bed I've ever had. Hope you have a good day, Mr. Tech YES Man.
I've tried Intel SDE on LGA1366 to run things that requires AVX but it's extremely slow since it emulates even the instructions that the CPU supports. Is there some way to make it emulate only the instruction sets the CPU doesn't have?
on a similar system Q9550 and a GTX 650 1GB and 8GB RAM I play Stellaris. Works fairly well as long as I stick to medium size maps (N.B. that system is on Open Suse 15.5
Make sure to have all your drivers on a usb so when you boot the OS, you can select your drivers for install before the OS install. Legacy is your friend before the updates to the drivers before using the ata drivers. Core 2 Quad for me was a huge Win! Give that a try for later on.
From that time I had a 2008 HP dc5850 with an AMD Phenom X3 8600 and it did run at 2.3GHz and 4GB DDR2 666MHz. Later I used the HP with a Phenom II X4 B97 and that did run at 3.2GHz and it had 8GB DDR2 800MHz. I used it without issues till May 2019, when I did build a Ryzen PC.
Hi Brian if its the Q6600 Cpu you can electrical tape OIC is if the Mobo suppoer 1333 bus speed the Q6600 runs 1066 Mzh so whit the tape OC u get if i remembr right a jump on FSB and Clok speed to 3 Ghz
That case is cool
There's a few older "alternative" OSes I like to mess with whose hardware support tops out at ich9 based systems, and Ive consistently had good luck with p35 and to a lesser extent p31 based boards for overclocking. I have my q9550 clocked at 4.4ghz stable on air. It's obviously very dated compared to modern gear, but there's a lot of fun to be with systems like this. Its still fine for basic tasks in the modern computing world and has decades of software of all shapes and sizes and genres that it will run extremely well.
Last year a neighbor asked me if i could change his Windows on a notebook and as a favor he gave me a Q9550, a good mother and 8GB. I accepted it and converted it along with a GTX 750ti into a machine for emulators and old PC games. It works like a charm
A mi me paso algo similar al querer instalar win10 en un q9500 y en un e8400, y lo que encontre es que con una version de win10 de este año no se instalaba, pero con una version de win10 de hace 2 años si se podia hacer la instalacion.
Do the tape mod on the CPU. That's how you do an overclock on it. There are two pins on the other side of that CPU that if you cover them in electrical tape, it'll increase the multiplier
Must try to fire up my old Optiplex 960 with a Q9650 😁
That was an absolute unit of a chip when released.
@@christophermullins7163 Yeah, the Optiplex is similar to Brian's, but I also have an old Gigabyte 775 DDR3 board. Will probably transfer it there. Fun to play with old stuff. Makes you appreciate the advancements more.
i still got a Q9400 in the parts bin, might have to give it a spin and see if i can get better results.
The core 2 quad is better used as a retro ultimate windows xp Overkill system. You can get away with using newer OS but its not really worthwhile when used systems from 2012 are already going to be better with Windows 10 and more likely have the instruction set support needed for newer games. I gave my best friend my old QX6700 core 2quad and the intel "Bad Axe" motherboard to build an ultimate windows xp Overkill system and it works perfectly for that.
Built my brother a P35 w/E1280 and ddr2 800 and 1950 pro, in 2006. Now it has a Q9550 w/ HD5770 and he fires it up everyday...... His, 'modern', PC is a 6600K w/ gtx1060.
You could use SetFSB utility in Windows to bump the FSB and OC that way
CORE 2 SQUAD! I was still using a C2Q back in 2016, but today it's too outdated. I wonder if my 7800X3D can survive 15 years of use? Maybe maybe.
No system is obsolete as long as it does what you need to do. Sure it can’t play many modern games, but there’s innumerable great games that will run on it. Also I’m still not sure why you have so much bad luck with 775, 99% of the time it just works for me. I can only guess that super micro board is a bit weird.
I had a Q6700 core 2 Quad, 2 x ATi 4850 512MB GPUs, OCZ 30GB SSD, 4GB of DDR2, 2 x 120GB SATA 2 HDD with a 1080p 24inch monitor back in mid 2000's and Win XP later went to Win 7 as it was much better at handling mutliple cores. NOTE: It's worth noting that the Core 2 Quad isn't a "true" quad core, it's apparently just two dual-core processors stuck together
I had Q8400 from 2010-2024 and Q9400 from 2013-2024, from win 7 to 10. Most of the time no problem. Motherboard died several time from black out and PSU problems but my Q9400 and Q8400 refuse to die. It's just too slow for nowaday and sold them to get used xeon haswell.
I'm having trouble with a Sossaman Xeon build ATM Win 10 sees both CPUs but only 1 core per cpu, instead of 2. Essentially, it's a dual cpu Core Duo system. All my bios settings are correct. I have multicore enabled. I don't know if I am running the latest bios, but to update it I would need a floppy drive. The weird part is device manager sees all 4 cores. Even CPU-Z only sees 1 core per CPU.🤷🏼♂️
BSEL tape mod my man is your friend!!!
The 16GB of DDR2 looks like high density ram which is not compatible with intel CPUs, i have a similar kit on an old Phenom II X6 1090T build.
Typically being unable to install windows on a fresh SSD is a RAM error ime. just ran into that again a couple days ago. not only did it fail the windows install, it completely mucked up my brand new flash drive.
the windows installation issues depends on boards, I have Asus & Gigabyte boards that work flawlessly with USB installer but a few other brands that don't work. Their values are on retro gaming, definitely not modern gaming
The Necktie :D
I still have my old ddr2 pc with a quad2core q6600 stored in my closet. I was able to run Windows 10 on it but had to use a SSD sata drive to do so and it was a little glitchy.
I had the same cpu in 10 years ago 👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍
If the motherboard supports one of the socket 775 Xeons you might, just might, get better results?
still running a q6600 one one of my systems, pc most likley did not boot propably because that mother board has an 8 gb 800mhz limit some can go a bit higher but not all and prob no ecc support for ram most of them are like that unless you get a better board and good ddr2 is not to easy to find these days.
installing windows issue is odd: got a dell laptop, and another core 2 desktop on an intel (socket 775) that i have installed win 10 with no bios tweaking and no issue. power button turns off: you can set that in power management thingie on winndows, both 10 & 11. lap[top still alive but desktop one mem channel died.
2 things would make this better: 1- use an amd card for less cpu driver overhead on older struggling processors 2- overclock using the tape method These both would have made a significant difference
I have a lot of experience with this era of systems, & AMD AM2+ Athlon II X4's Boogie all over Intel for longevity as they can all core OC well(i have one as a backup system on an MSI Micro ATX board with a 2.9Ghz all core OC on air with 8GB DDR II 800Mhz RAM) while not getting too hot, or drawing tons of power, and they support 800Mhz DDR2 RAM sticks, plus run really well with a good Linux distro like Manjaro Gnome, or Solus Budgie, then thrown in an older card like an AMD R7 240 2GB, then game at 720p, and you're golden to play a lot more titles than you think on STEAM with Proton for Linux.
I believe you can smoothly running almost any DX9 titles at this point (2008) with few earlier DX11 titles with this machine.
Wasn't the q6600 the first one? Paid top dollar for one back in the day and that thing was awesome!