It would make for a good beefy xp box, it would max out a lot of xp only games or it would make a great windows 8.1 + Classic shell daily. You can run games like saints row the third or GTA5 on the q6600 paired with a good video card.

Yes, it will run Windows 10 64bit so maxing XP will be easy, pair it with say a GTX 290 and go have fun

It had 300 Watt PSU, GeForce 295 would suck it dry singlehandedly.

Stick a Soundblaster XFi/Audigy in it and use it to run the EAX games that don't play well with Alchemy

Neato the poser button is in the top, that defiantly a grate selling point.

As for what to do with it? Don't know, I strip it for parts or sell it.

would make a good XP box, if you use it for gaming you'll need a sound card with EAX, the 8400 should do but you may want to upgrade it.

Putas wrote:

It had 300 Watt PSU, GeForce 295 would suck it dry singlehandedly.

So upgrade the PSU, 300W is barley enough for what it has, and given its age it may not work at 100% load anymore and give random issues

Put linux on it and use it as a file server or Minecraft server, or other game server. And as others said, fast XP gaming system. My own XP system (pretty much my daily driver) is based on a similar platform and it works beautifully.

XP box... as everyone else has been saying.

Perhaps also an excuse to bust out the canned air and Q-tips. With that much dust on the exterior, I wonder how it looks on the inside.

Friend of mine actually had a spare (and almost complete) Q6600 collecting dust. A friend of mine and me re-completed the rig by purchasing all remaining missing components, installed Win7 and it's now in use as a LAN rig here at my place (and doing a very good job at it I might say!).

And yes 300W is very poor, a 500W good quality would do it more justice. It's roughly comparable to something like a Phenom II 3.2GHz (roughly) but the rig here uses DDR2 which is harder to upgrade cheaply.

Throw Windows 10 or 7 on it and make it a nice daily driver if you know anyone that needs one.

You can try BSEL mod to 3GHz (Q6600 G0 should be able to do it without Vcore change) : LINK
That way, you will get extra 25% performance from it + heat output increase should be minimal (ie. Intel 30mm BOX cooler should be able to cope with it).

Max out the mem and add a large raid setup of some sort.
Install Linux on it or Unix, and Samba. Then you have a NAS.
Add more servers such as Minecraft and some Open SSH.

The PSU on that is standard ATX format. If you upgrade it and add a Radeon 4870 / 4890 / 5850 or GTX 280 you get a really nice XP box that can run games witch don't really work well on win 10 (warhammer 40k, earth 2150, Crisis 1 (warhead works fine on win10) and so on).

Thanks for all the suggestions, folks. I have an Antec TruePower 480W PSU that was looking for a home. The MB is an Asus IPIBL-LA.

The inside of the case is filthy, but I haven't had time to clean it yet.

The Vista drivers are all on HP's site, but I'm not sure if they will work with XP.

Drivers should not be a problem. If you cant find the drivers just go to the Devicemanager and get the ven and dev number and google it. The Mainboard supports 800 1066 and 1333 Mhz FSB, so overklocking to 3 Ghz should be possible if the Bios will allows it (just set it from 1066 fsb to 1333). But the Intel G33 Chipset only supports PCIe 1.1, so if you put a to new card in it, it will not reach the maximum it could.

For example: I also own a Q6600@3 Ghz on an Asus mainboard whit the same chipset. I used to have a Radeon HD 4870 on it and replaced it whit a R9 270X. Did some benchmark (3dMark and so on), whit almost no difference compared to the old card. Now I changed the mainboard and CPU to an i5 and and the results are much better (BF4 from 30-50Fps to 130-180Fps).