They are so versatile! From DOS to Windows 10. Amazing!

Phil's videos are also retro bargains

Phil, that's actually not even bad. Think that we get old hella expensive Xeons for practically free these days and it's not a disaster if you kill one with overclocking with extreme voltages. :D

One of the coolest things about this retro journey is the journey itself! I used to be an AMD enthusiast of about 30 years, and only recently got into Intel CPUs as well. And playing around with retro Intels as well is more of an extra flavour, since I never used them back in the day. Sort of like discovering a new platform in inself.

My gaming desktop is still a 775, a P35-DS3L, never changed it from 2008, only minor updates (more RAM, a Xeon 771 and storage). I work everyday with a laptop. I enjoy watching videos when max out a 775 platform. That was an incredible lasting platform.

You can never go wrong with socket 775 for retro gaming. Parts are easy to find and won't need a huge budget. Always great to see you upload Phil. I have a Radeon HD 7770 i need to pair it with one of the socket 775 computers I've got.

Always excited to see your videos especially about retro flagships 🤓

My friend found the Core2Quad Q9650 in pile of e-waste. I'll definitely take it, since that cpu is just awesome. It should be faster and cooler and it's the best Core2Quad non-extreme.

I need to revisit my old 775 build. It held on like a champ until 2018 when i switched over to lga 1366

Setting up a retro 775 Xeon build as we speak. Core 2 truly was one of the most based CPU architectures of all time, and with good 400MHz boards it can really stretch its legs even today, its main bane being lack of instructions at this point.

Hello Phil, thank you for your videos! You are my personal wayback-machine to my childhood and teenage years. I love every single video, you've done. Lot of projects I've done are based on your videos. And the downloads on your well sorted Website often helps me with this projects. Thank you!

Quake 4 is an EAX 5 showpiece. If you play it with an X-Fi card, it really shines. In particular, the explosions become a lot more realistic.

thanks, well done! yes, 775 is so cheap right now and still so fun!

You are spot on about the value of the E8400 Core 2 and related sister cpus. I never met an Extreme edition bench that an E8400 could not beat. I'm starting to wonder when we will see you doing some LGA 1156/ 1366 cpu builds as they are hitting the sweet spot in pricing now too. They may not feel retro, but they are now 12+ years old and very cheap on the market. Mostly. Great video as usual.

I'm upgrading my struggling Athlon64 Machine with a Core2 Duo E6850 Prozessor on a MSI P6N SLI V2 Board for old Windows XP/7 Games. Maybe upgrading the machine to a SLI. Doesn't make much sense, but I never played around with SLI.

I had a Q9650 in my main PC for nearly 10 years. From 2008 until 2018. Such longevity.

E8400 owner here. Thanks for the Videos as always Phil.

Happy Friday Phil! I’m still fond of the Core2Duo line of CPUs. I never got into the Extreme CPUs though. Instead I had quite a lot of fun with the 771-to-775 mod for Xeon CPUs. I even ran Windows 10 for bit with one of these modded Xeons on a 775 board. My main rig for awhile now has a socket 1366 board (Dell 730x with modded Alienware BIOS.) I do still have a few WinXP/Win7 systems with 775 boards though I use to play some older games.

Quake 4 was one of my favs. Took me a week to beat it. I was pretty amazed at how smooth it was and how good it looked for the time. I love how it keeps true to Quake by slowly taking you into a descent to madness and hell that you have to overcome and destroy. Great great time playing it.

I don't know why, The one reason I like this channel, is his hoodie. Beyond just the retro PC Hardware

you are spot on about the extreme and the cost.. .. thanks for the video.

The 775 was a great socket - I used my QX6800 up until early 2019! And then the only reason I went to a new machine was Windows 10 just didn't properly support the nForce 680i - basically giving random resets on disk activity...

This was back when I was starting building computers. I knew a bit just when the Pentium D was out, but this is the nostalgia, seen that Gigabyte Speed Smart Safe screen brought back memories of my Core 2 Duo machine.

Breakfast with Phil's. Thank you. 🙏❤

I remember my QX6800 I got at a big discount as Frys was making room for the then new QX6850

Good video :). I just finished building my windows XP rig. Core2duo E8600, Asus p5n-e sli, 2 evga 9600gt's and a Fatal1ty x-fi. I'm loving it.

I have 2. I also got a tray of Intel samples from an Intel employee out on disability. I gave them back. As foolish as that sounds. After looking them up I realized they had to be stolen and he was supposed to destroy them or they were never supposed to leave storage. He actually told me I was stupid for not selling them. He also gave me a tray of Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge, Haswell and Broadwell as well as an original Itanium (Huge chip), and some other specialty items like the extreme edition Nehalem and some other x58, x79 and x99 parts. I kept the Itanium, and gave him $20. He was fine with it.

Hi, Phil and thank you for another great retro-pc hobby related video. My story related to the socket 775 is when I decided to get my own Windows XP gaming retro rig I choosed the Q9650 (3 GHz) processor which I can say is very very fast and nice. You may ask why? Because the 4 cores. back in the days I had Q9550 processor (2.8 GHz), before the Q9550 I had E8600 which is very good, cold and fast.

I have an ASUS P5PE-VM (basically a poor man's ASRock 775i65G R3.0) and it supports the X6800 and unofficially the Pentium E5800. I benchmarked both CPUs and performance is pretty much identical for gaming. Quake 4 was also one of the first games to support multicore CPUs (Half-Life 2 and others would eventually get support patched in). It's turned off by default though. At 800x600 high with a Radeon HD 3850 AGP and X6800 the built in benchmark went from 109 FPS to 147 FPS.

I always saw these premium processors for people that just had money to burn. The Q6600 for example would get you almost all the way there but at less than half the price. So it made more sense to get that and , spluge on the GPU which was more important for gaming. Still these are neat to come back to and explore. What i remember most is how fast CPUs were developing in those times.

My main PC fron 2007 to 2021 was a QX6850 OC@ 4Ghz. Saludos desde Venezuela.

Great video! Is it possible for a second video with some overclocking on the X6800, since it has an unlocked multiplier?

Coffee and Phil on a Sat morning, don't mind if I do! I went from Q6750 to Q9550 that system lasted almost a decade, I still have it in the shed, one day I'll dust it off for the man cave or something. I think you'd just as well served with Q9550 or Q6600 instead of an extreme version.

One of my favourite chips and platform. Almost completed the entire Core 2 collection. Missing some extremes, they can be very hard and expensive to get. The QX9770 and an engineering sample of a X6800 are some of the top pieces.

5:05 Very few people would have run Crysis at 1920x1080 back in 2007. Most of us had CRTs or 17-19" TFT panels with 1280x1024 resolution. I played the game at 1280x1024 with about 30 fps on average and down to 15-20 fps in the last boss battle. Great game for it's time and it pushed hardware to it's limits.

My PC still works with E8700, 4gb ram, win 10, for basic needs (mail, yt, lighter games) it still doesn't need replacement

This brings back memories. I had one of these back in 2007-ish. It was an engineering sample (QPHV), and I got it really cheap because the seller didn't know what it was. Unfortunately, it was already superseded by the E8000-series and quad-cores by then, and it didn't overclock very well due to high voltage and thus temperature. So, novelty value aside, the X6800 (along with QX6700/6800/6850) was a terribly pointless product, as its premium was too high for marginal performance gains. The same can be said about AMD's A64 FX series. At least today's "premium" models like the i9-12900/13900/14900KS are only slightly more expensive than their non-S counterparts, so they might actually be better buys, especially used.

I too love revisiting the cream of the crop hardware from back in the day, usually very fun.

I have run AMD in my main PC for decades but in the past 7 or 8 years, I've really come to appreciate socket 775, 1155, and 1366. 775 is just so versatile and just keeps hanging in there. I'm actually still running an old Lenovo mini desktop as a business PC that started life as a Core 2 Duo but which i have since upgraded to a Xeon L5408 quad core (socket 771). It doesn't game so it handles everything i throw at it including Photoshop.

Conroe was such a good overclocker which made these extreme editon processors pointless for any real enthusiast. I had an E4300 that would happily do 3GHz on stock volts and 3.6ghz (100% overclock) with a small voltage bump

I had a Dual Core E5400, which was already a budget option of a budget option. But I'm not complaining, because it lasted me almost 10 years. The 775 socket was an excellent workhorse for me, great value for the money and I'd get another one if the opportunity presents itself. Thank you for the video, Phil!

Nice review

Can you please make video of this Wayback machine and how to use/browse it. It looks interesting.

A great PC and a great video!! 😎

Intel Core 2 Extreme Processor X6800, meant to run on Pentium boards, not that fast. You better go for the Core 2 Extreme Kentsfields, 1333 MHz FBS, up to the QX6850, 130 Watt Many CPU's are retrospective called Extreme Core 2, both Dual and Quad.

Check this out, I was inspired to fire up my 775 rig with my old and mighty Q9550, I have this overclocked to 3,53GHZ (On AIR) and I ran Passmark on it, I got a CPU Mark of 3285 points which is the fastest Q9550 score on record with CPU Mark, I really topped the chart and it showed 0 baselines with a similar score. King of the hill baby! I have this checked with Cinebench R23 as well and the multicore score is 2095points and single core 539. man I miss the times when computers could overclock as much as the 775 did

I still have a complete mainboard with a q6600 in the drawer which i retired in 2017.

I got an old Dell XPS with a qx6800 (quad core) X-FI sound card and a 8800gts for £5 years ago. Dropped 2 x 250GB hdds in there in raid0 and it's a great XP machine....Still going strong, though not sure the 2 extra cores matter. I think it's ready for a new PSU though.

Back in 2006 I had an E6300. I used at stock speeds until I get an Asrock motherboard that supported 1600Mhz FSB overclock. I achieved 2,93Ghz with the E6300, rock solid, with a slight overvoltage. The record was 3,06GHz, but with that it freezed with cinebench after a few minutes. The E6xxx series processors was beasts back then.

Couple years ago i've scored X6800 for 25 bucks, and exactly year ago i found X1950XTX for around 20 bucks :D Sometimes people don't know what they're selling.

Another great video. When these came out they were too expensive for my budget, I had staggered in to the realm of AMD processors by this time. I always wanted to get one but never did.

18 year old platform still able to perform basic daily tasks. If not for CS2 SSE4.2 , it would still be my competitive secondary gaming PC.

But can it run Crysis??! Yes, yes it can...04:32..Great video as usual Phil...

I found EE and FX's prices outrageous back then. In a computer shop we used to work we had one FX (I don't remember the model) and for some time we couldn't sell it to anyone, my boss offered me a meager U$S10 bonus if I could find a buyer... I would love to have some EEs and FXs now :-)

Scorptec forever! E4300 was where it was at!

Quake 4 is among my top favorite old-school fps games. The graphics held pretty well too.

Now I really want to see what the Intel Business Card Holder looks like.

the 45 nm refresh could do ddr3 on some boards so you could have like 16 gb ddr3 on a quad core machine that can run both xp64 bit and win 10

Wonderful video!! I had a core 2 duo e6600 which I overclocked back in the day too, with an 8800GT (I think)... Phil - I have a question... I have a thing for different accents in English, and your Australian accent sounds really unique to me... Almost as if it's mixed with a German accent... am I wrong?

Like! Quake 4 looks like a mod for Doom 3. I was really disappointed back then.

This video brought back lots of memories. Used to have an E6600 that ran overclocked to 3.6 GHz from day one on an Asus P5B Deluxe, Cellshock 1000 MHz Ram with an 8800 Ultra. Those were the days.

You should make a video talking about tips and tricks for finding ancient pc tech. Ebay is only so much fun. Thrift stores are occasionally amazing, but the chains like salvation army don't do electronics here in the US.

G'day Phil, This is the Retro Generation I love playing with the most, While I don't have any Core 2 Extreme CPUs I have quite a few C2D & C2Q CPUs & 775 Motherboards. For CPUs I have E7500/7600/8400/8600 plus a few older ones I forget & Q6600 (3🤷‍♂not sure why so many) Q9450/9650 I mainly stick with Gigabyte for the Motherboards with a 965P-DQ6 & some G31M & G33Ms as they all still have their own page with access to Drivers, Manual & Compatability Lists, While I do have my Retro build most just get used for playing & relearning on my test bench along with my ASUS G41M DDR2/DDR3 & EVGA nForce 750i SLI FTW. Ps I love Window Shopping LGA775 Motherboards on Ebay, I would like to find one of the Gigabytes with the "Copper City" style Cooler for VRM/Northbridge/Southbridge.

I bought a QX6850 years ago, found out that there was a 10 degrees Celsius difference between both of its die. Also provided a noticably worse experience within Windows 7 than Xeon X5450 and E5450 on the same Asus P5Q Deluxe. Did end up running the FSB at 1600MHz however, for an easy overclock of 3.6GHz. CPU actually didn't like going above 3.8GHz at all, even with the FSB lowered to 1066MHz and DDR800 (albeit a 2x1GB OCZ kit with 4-4-4-12 timings). Never actually used it for much more than benchmarking due to just how much better the Xeons were in every way - unlocked multipliers are pointless when the E5450 would happily run at 4.4GHz with similar power consumption and a lower core voltage. Plus 12MB of L2 cache (6+6 instead of 4+4).

Socket 775 + GTX 750/650: cost effective XP game system

Will I ever get bored of this kind of content?..nope..never.

Well, as you said there was no significant over the lower Intel CPUs, that's why I never felt like owning an QX. I had an E2140 runnign at 3,1GHz back then. A little more clock than the QX6800 for compensating the smaller cache a bit and 2 instead of 4 cores which of course did not matter the last when there just where very few games making use of just two cores and even fewer applications. So the overclocked budget CPU is way more fascinating IMHO :) Also still have the Athlon XP2600+ mobile which could run faster than the desktop 3200+ that I was using before on the legendary Abit AN-7 - It was great when overclocking still made sense :)

It'd be interesting to see modern-ish benchmarks with the 6-core Dunnington Xeon X7460, which is the same architecture despite the extra cores. PassMark doesn't have an entry for it but the closely related L7455 is on the level of the Phenom II X4 975.

The perfect cpu for my asrock 4core dual vsta!

Certainly they arent cheap in the UK. They are mostly listed on ebay for £90-£110. I waited for over a year before I saw one for £35 and snapped it up. Even that is a crazy price compared to the E6600 that I got for £5 delivered whilst waiting for the X6800. It is in my 'ultimate" Windows 98 PC along with Geforce 4 Ti 4600, Soundblaster Audigy ZS and Western Digital Velociraptor 150Gb (10k RPM HDD with transparent side to see it's workings"). Its a fantastic CPU for sure and definitely very overkill for Win98. I love it though. So snappy. I tried geforce FX but found it less compatible than Geforce 4.

found a q6600 quad system 4gb ddr2 with ati gpu in trash few days ago, plugged it in 1st time no post, reseated the ram and got into bios, its optiplex with 4 core which was a nice surprise maybe ill sell it someday, still havent figured out what gpu is init though bc no os installed

My first SLI build was on 775, lots of nostalgia for this as I always wanted to do the 771 to 775 mod, but could never justify it. I used to flex on having 8gb of DDR2, SLI and stupid overclocks on nForce boards at the time. The funny bit looking back is that vista was the new and interesting at the time

An early Core 2 (Conroe) extreme sample provided to Anandtech was clocked at 3.33 GHz; interesting as X6800 actually ended up 400 MHz slower, though OC to 3.33 GHz was pretty easy.

I'm writing this message from QX9650 4GHz, Asus P5E3 DeLuxe, 16Gb RAM DDR3 1600 9-9-9-24 CR1, GTX 970, SSD SATA2.

Q4 is one of my favorite FPSs of all time, oddly I havent had any issues playing it on my 2070 Super. Beaten the game several times over since I purchased it.

Is quake 4 optimized for newer versions of windows

I was abke to get an X6800 a couple years ago and was a bit disappointed. Its performance was same or less than the e6800 I already had. It was still good but was not an upgrade for that build...better and cheaper to go with 8000 or 9000 series quad cores. It definitely.gets tje job done for an XP build. Need some 1920×1200 benchmarks. 16:10 was a great resolution in for a build like this though the games you tested may not be best suited for that resolution.

I love the 775 platform, still used those till recently on a projects PC, a q6600 overclocked to 3.0ghz Would really love to get a good GPU from around this area, only found a bad ddr2 gt 9500, still most of the more demanding games still runs ok on windows 7 instead of XP, so I can cheat and use a 2nd gen core i3 and a cheap gt 730

😃 yay! Boeing 775 FTW! 😘😍😊

Amazing thing is that Max Payne 1/2 remakes are coming!

I'm curious if that that motherboard would run reliably on Windows 98SE, I've been on the hunt for a board that is a full sized to have the fastest all rounder for Windows 98SE and Windows XP. The only problem left is the graphics card. Officially I think, is the Nvidia 6800 Ultra Extreme Edition, branded with EVGA based on a bit of research. But to get that exact one? I've never seen one sold on ebay.

LGA 775 is back!

i have a core duo and eagle lake, and i get smoother fps when the dual core option in quake 4 is set to off 🤷‍♂️ not sure why. either way im maxed out at the 4k of its day which is why i have not really looked into it. content idea - how to play various unreal games in online multiplayer since epic walked away. the good news is you can and its as fun as ever.

Core 2 Quads are still fairly good for everyday use. My wife happily used a Q8200 with 8 GB RAM, a GTX750 and an SSD under Linux as her daily driver a year ago. She even run Krita and Blender.

Dual LGA771 quad-core system build please :D

I have numerous 775 cpus, the best I would say is the E8400 and the Q9550, easy to find and affordable. There's no point in messing with the Xeon's and the socket mods imo.

Memories of Core 2 Extreme make me scratch my head at the negative reviews for something like a 14900KS. The flagship chips have always commanded a premium that doesn’t make sense from a price:performance standpoint. I would say now though, that premium is less than ever. The X6800 is cool though since it was the last premium dual core chip. 4 months later the QX6700 came out making it obsolete, it’s crazy how fast tech moved in those days.

I have one of these with an AGP card 😁 HD4670 from HIS with 1 GB DDR3. I bought the CPU together with a board and cooler for 70 euros.

I was shocked I could run the latest Windows 11 23H2 on an old Sony Vaio Core 2 Duo laptop I had siting around. I'll most likely put Linux on it though but I was curious.

Nowadays I just go for a modded socket 771 Xeon to really squeeze the most performance out of socket 775 boards with 1333Mhz FSB. Have you ever done a video comparing Pentium III Katmai vs their counterparts Pentium III Coppermine, and possibly significant differences between a lower clocked CPU with higher FSB versus a higher clocked CPU with a lower FSB? My current Win95 machine has a Pentium III 550E (Coppermine FSB + 100Mhz FSB) and I'm building a 2nd one with a Pentium III 866 (Coppermine + 133Mhz FSB). The letter B is used to distinguish between a 133Mhz from an older 100Mhz, the letter B is deprecated if only the 133Mhz variant exists. The letter E is used to distinguish a newer Coppermine from an older Katmai, the letter B is also deprecated is only the Coppermine variant exists. FSB 100MHz = 450, 500, 500E, 550, 550E, 600, 600E, 650, 700, 750, 800, 850, 1000 (>=650 MHz = all Coppermines) FSB 133MHz = 533B, 533EB, 600B, 600EB, 667, 733, 800EB, 866, 933, 1000B, 1133 (>= 667 MHz = all Coppermines)

For me Max Payne 2 is the best in series. What i found in Quake 4 if you set msaa x4 or higher game gets some stutter even on GTX 280 or GTX 470. On msaa x2 game runs very smooth.

Nice! Where can i find a nocd patch for max payne?

Of the era, modded Xeons and the trusty Core2 Quad Q6600 are my favorites.

I looked into the core2extreme for my retro xp build, but the fastest core2quad was better so I just went with that. My motherboard supports all of the core2 processors. The amazing thing is it will run semi modern games with a good graphics card.

lol you almost gave me a heart attack thinking these were fetching $1k today. I have one of these CPUs sitting in a case somewhere. It's fine but the low RAM on contemporary motherboards kinda limits it for anything useful now.

1156 socket was the biggest leap if u ask me. i still have the i5 750 (4 Cores, 4 Threads @2.66GHz) clocked at 3ghz. it is faster than the fastest 2 core extreme and was also quite cheap back then. my nephew is using it for gaming with a rx 6600

Now Iam curious about the free intel watch !!!!

The AMD Athlon FX were off the hook back then. But back then AMD was still in the lead. I was on AMD from Thunderbird to Phenom II for gaming. I even built an FX 8350 system as a console killer at the end of the road. I had a nehalem i5 in a Dell mini ITX that was cool and quiet and performed on par with the FX 8350 that I used for most tasks and watching videos. It didn't really matter to me which I had back then. There weren't huge gaps like the leaps we saw 20 years earlier up to the 00s that saw Moore's law flourish. Once we hit the land of diminishing returns on a uArch that a company refused to update it really didn't matter anymore. So I usually had one of each. And they always beat each other in certain titles and lost to each other in certain titles. Same with productivity, however back then, Intel still reigned supreme.

Later Core 2 Duo E6850's had better overclocking potential. As soon as the E8500 and higher released those older 'extreme' CPU's immediately became fully obsolete. I had a E8650 that ran at 4.7GHz under phase-change cooling.🎉

Tbh, I would love to pair a Core 2 Extreme with Windows 98, just for fun. Probably that would be my processor of choice instead of Pentium 4, (Hopefully, at least) which like I said before (To not repeat myself, mind you.) I'm not really a fan of it, so that's what I would do. I have a Core 2 Duo E8500 as my XP and 7 Machine, so... Yup, Definitely I would do something a bit different to what I have here. Nice to see Quake 4 now, Since the last time I reminded myself of that game that exist was thanks to that First Episode of Polish TV Gaming Channel about Reviews of games.