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GPUs and CPUs

Intel Core 2 Quad

6owners with an opinion
60%of verdicts positive
3/2positive/negative since 2024
12 yrslongest happy owner
1happy after 3+ years

Praised for reliability and performance; criticized for value.

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What owners wrote

Likes itOwned 12 years
I've got a desktop with a Core2Quad Q9300, originally built in 2008. Updated the motherboard in 2010 to one with USB3, updated the GPU in 2012. Kept using that machine as my daily-driver until 2020, when I built my current desktop. The only real reason that I did that was to improve gaming performance. The machine itself still functions fine on the modern web (using an up-to-date Linux distro, of course). 8GB of RAM used to feel like a monster.
Doesn’t like it
I'm mired by my own perspective. I bought an SLI pair of 9800GTs in ~2008. I found SLI wasn't worth the difficulty (and neither was a dedicated PhysX processor), so I eventually gave one of them away to a friend who wanted a video card. My old man was scooping up scrap metal in 2015 and found a Radeon card (I forget which exact model) that was faster than the SLI 9800GTs ever were, and which had twice the RAM. It was on top of pile of trash at the curb on a small town's annual collection day. It worked great, though my PSU only had a bunch of 6-pin power connectors and this one required 8-pin (a problem that I patched around with a soldering iron). Shortly after, in 2016, I also upgraded to an i3 and DDR4 because it was cheap at the time. One core of that was faster than all 4 cores of the once-beastly Q6600 it replaced. It was an awesome upgrade. I wrote on Reddit about some problem or other with getting X going on the thing, and some well-meaning individual noticed the Radeon card. They asked me why I was even bothering with that, and opined that the i3's built-in iGPU was probably actually-better, maybe-faster, and definitely better-supported than the dedicated GPU -- while just sipping power. They were right: It was faster, better, and cheaper. Out came the Radeon GPU and things got better after that. Around that time, Rockstar was in the process of abandoning GTA:V on ye olde PS3 and was giving away the PC version of the game to PS3 users, along with account tran…
Likes it
Yeah. The article tells a good story and I agree with it. I even bought an Athlon 64 CPU back in ~2004. What I want to add to the story is that when Intel Core 2 came out (and it was an x86-64 chip), it absolutely crushed AMD's Athlon 64 processors. It won so hard that, more or less, the lowest spec Core 2 CPU was faster than the highest spec Athlon 64 CPU. (To confirm this, you can look up benchmark articles around the year 2006, such as those from Tom's Hardware Guide.) Needless to say, my next computer in 2008 was a Core 2 Quad, and it was indeed much faster than my Athlon 64. The Core 2 and all its sequels were how Intel dominated over AMD for about a decade until AMD Zen came along.
Doesn’t like it
I have a Core 2 Quad machine around from 2008 for nostalgia reasons and retro computing, and even with a modern lightweight Linux on it, it's definitely not enough for modern computing unless what you consider modern computing is writing text documents and viewing websites ... slowly, and for that it's extremely wasteful since it has a 95W TDP while a 2W modern smartphone/tablet can do that even faster and more efficient, plus it's also portable. Having to do any kind of 2025 type of work on it would be testing my patience to the extremes because all SW and media has grown in size and/or complexity(AV1 encoding, etc) requiring faster CPU, GPU, storage and RAM for the optimum experience. The only things that run fast on it are period accurate Linux 2.6 and Windows XP with websites form 2008, but I wouldn't call that modern computing. Computers have gotten night and day faster and especially more efficient since 2008, pretending otherwise would be in bad faith.
Likes it
If you usage is mostly spreadsheets and web apps the 5 year old i7 will be perfectly fine. I'm currently on a Quad Core Q9650 desktop from only God knows how many years ago, and it works perfectly fine after upgrading to 16Gb RAM and an NVME SSD, with the latter being what a 5 year old i7 may be equipped with. On a laptop battery life is your main concern and it is something you have to look into. Some newer peripherals may be a bit of a problem, but if you are mostly on the go you'll be fine.