Credit to eibgrad @ SD.

Did a search and did not see that it was posted here. Frys has the Q6600 back at $180 plus shipping. The last time it was this price was during the "Charlie Chip" special back in April though there is nothing on the site stating this is the G0 stepping this time.

Link
This is retail box w/ heatsink and fan plus 3 year warranty.

*Edit*
"Latest G0 Stepping" - Thanks SliverOfFear.

did anyone find out if Charlie is indeed the CEO of frys?

Yeah, to make it easier on them- ask them to see if they could check for the stepping you want before they go to the cage instead of having them bring one to you and then maybe asking them to go back to ask for a different one.

deshwasi said:did anyone find out if Charlie is indeed the CEO of frys?

This Charlie?

looks like it's oos

Looks like it's back in stock.

I added this to my machine back in April during the last sale.

A couple of things to know... this runs about 10 degrees hotter than the dual core. This only matters when considering how quiet you want the machine. The stock Intel cpu fan runs faster and generates more noise. This may not matter to most folks.

For most operations, people will not notice a difference, but if you do a lot of video rendering this is twice as fast. It's well worth it if you do a lot of computationally intensive work (photoshop, video rendering, any kind of multimedia rendering). I don't think it would have much effect on games.

Overall, it's a very nice CPU.

tkrotchko said:I added this to my machine back in April during the last sale.

A couple of things to know... this runs about 10 degrees hotter than the dual core. This only matters when considering how quiet you want the machine. The stock Intel cpu fan runs faster and generates more noise. This may not matter to most folks.

For most operations, people will not notice a difference, but if you do a lot of video rendering this is twice as fast. It's well worth it if you do a lot of computationally intensive work (photoshop, video rendering, any kind of multimedia rendering). I don't think it would have much effect on games.

Overall, it's a very nice CPU.

I agree...from the benchmarks I've seen, this quad is much faster at video encoding, etc than a dual core (e.g., E8400); however, as you pointed out, a fast dual core (e.g., E8400) is faster at gaming since it's clocked higher and games are not coded yet to fully take advantage of 4 cores.

If I didn't know Nehalem beats this by 40% clock for clock....I might actually pick this up.

Sigh....only 10 more months

opathal said:If I didn't know Nehalem beats this by 40% clock for clock....I might actually pick this up.

Sigh....only 10 more months
But a brand new Nahalem rig won't be 40% more cost-effective than this, providing you already have a LGA775 platform that supports C2D/Q right now. Intel has gone thru generations of northbridge development effort to reach today's maturity level, and I doubt they will perfect it the first time with the new architecture. This includes the expected chaos from drivers/softwares. I'll refrain myself from being an early adopter, so it'll be more like 20 months from now (i.e. by the time all the revision comes up)..