matze79 wrote:

i still use a A10-5800k and it does well in daily usage.

Even a C2Q is still sufficient for this.
Except for some stupid javascript loads..

I'm looking to doing dual monitor, keyboard, & mouse rather than two pcs to save on power.

The Serpent Rider wrote:

Core 2 has the lower speeds and voltages locked out

Wrong. Also on some boards FSB is adjustable down to the original 400mhz.

What is wrong? Only some boards can do lower speeds and lower voltages require a hardware mod?

ALL Pentium Ms can be set to .700V (likely to crash, but beside the point), and AMD can be set to .800V

Pretty much all boards allow to set the multiplier lower on any Core 2 CPU, it's the part of the SpeedStep technology. Voltage is the more tricky part, but decent boards usually allow to set it manually to 1v or even less.

I have Core 2 Duo E8400 which is stable at stock 3ghz with just 1v. Very cool and efficient.

What about a Q6600 solution with a DDR3 motherboard? Would it be "fast" enough?

I think bakemono has a point. In normal usage scenarios Core 2 has idle low speed/low voltage limits compared to Phenom II. Even if 600MHz Core 2 is possible as agent_x007 pointed out, it does not make sense if you also want reasonable performance (100 MHZ FSB speed is detrimental to memory performance in case of Core 2). If you want an overall good performance but energy efficient Core 2 setup you have to make compromises. For good memory performance you need at least 333-400 MHz FSB speed. And since the Core 2 minimum multiplier is 6x even if you can make Speedstep working you can only have a minimum performance state of 2000-2400 MHz (depending on FSB it's 6 x 333 or 6 x 400 MHz). But if you manually set the voltage and multiplier in BIOS, Speedstep usually does not work with most motherboards anyway. So for a working setup you should set the voltage to at least 1.x V.
Contrary in case of Phenom II the base clock is 200 MHz and this relatively low value has nothing to do with good (memory) performance. Since Phenom II with unlocked multipliers (Black Edition) is quite common, you can have both good performance and good idle power consumption. The minimum performance state of 800MHz (4 x 200 MHz) at 0.8v is guaranteed even if you overclock your Phenom II to 4GHz (20 x 200 MHz). Even in case of non Black Edition Phenom II the low 4x multiplier e.g. with overclocked 250 MHz base clock provides 1Ghz at 0.9 V on idle desktop.
I have both a Phenom II X4 and a Core 2 Duo 7500 desktop PC and idle performance is about the same because of the above written (full PC idle power consumption ~ 80W with same power meter). Full load power consumption is another story. The Phenom II is much more power hungry (about 70W difference).

Also the programming of Cool and Quiet P-State MSR's in case of Phenom II is better documented and more flexible than the Core 2 Speedstep registers:
http://falcosoft.hu/dos_softwares.html#sstep
http://falcosoft.hu/dos_softwares.html#pwr
https://sourceforge.net/p/freedos/mailman/message/31894268/

spiroyster wrote:

@tayyare
5113 FPS 😕

It's 51.13. A glitch caused by localised number settings ("," instead of "." for decimals) 🤣

386SX wrote:

What about a Q6600 solution with a DDR3 motherboard? Would it be "fast" enough?

I have both systems: a Phenom x6 1090T @ 4.07GHz, and a Q6700 (65nm) @ 4.00GHz on a DDR3 motherboard. I prefer the Phenom. It is slightly faster than the Q6700 in single-threaded applications (possibly due to the 70 extra MHz), and blows it away in well-threaded apps.

But IMO, applications that can make use of 6 cores should be run on a much faster system. So if, for some bizarre reason, you're restricting yourself to pre-Nehalem hardware, the 45nm C2Q becomes the ideal choice. Single-threaded performance is slightly higher than that of Phenom II and 65nm Core 2. They easily hit 4GHz and run cooler to boot. They also feature the SSE4.1 instruction set--something that both the 65nm Core 2 and Phenom II lack. More programs are starting to require SSE4.1.