Pros: This processor is amazing. I'm upgrading from an old 2.8Ghz P4 so the performance increase cannot be realistically compared, the Q6600 just blows the P4 out of the water with dynamite. I can't believe I waited so long before upgrading. I had no problem overclocking this processor to 3.6Ghz, before the Arctic Silver 5 broke in I was seeing 70C full load using Prime95, that dropped down to 65C for myself, ambient temps were about 25C. That is a little high for me personally, so I dropped it down to 3.2Ghz and I honestly don't see a difference in speed for the things I normally do (gaming, email, internet, VM's, etc.). However temps dropped down to about 55C at full load in Prime 95, same 25C ambient temps. Idle temps are also great, for me it idles at ambient temps no problem, this partially has to be because of the SpeedStep and the fact that I can run the stock motherboard vcore voltage (1.28V on my gigabyte board) even at 3.2Ghz. I'm using a 400Mhz FSB and 8x multiplier.

Cons: I wish it used the 45nm process, but since the Q9300 and Q9400 have a locked multiplier I decided to go with this so I could make use of speedstep and have greater flexibility for overclocking. Intel is going to be releasing a new, native quad core processor later this year/early '09. But I needed to get a new computer now.

Overall Review: If you run any kind of monitoring program to monitor core temperatures it is common to see cores 0 and 1 several degrees hotter than cores 2 and 3 since the Q6600 isn't a native quad core. It isn't anything to worry about, just the way the processor is made. System Specs: Vista Ultimate 64-bit, GigaByte GA-EX38-DQ6, 8Gb G.Skill DDR2 1066, Seasonic S12 650W PSU, Samsung SpinPoint F1 750Gb, Samsung 20x DVD +/- R burner, Antec 900 Case, Zalmann 9700 HSF, ATI X1600 (waiting for ATI to release their HD4000 series cards this summer :D). I honestly haven't used Vista on to many machines, so my opinion is a little biased. But this is hands down the fastest vista machine I've ever used. I was a little leary about moving to Vista, but since they finally released SP1 I decided to make the plunge. It's a lot faster than my P4 was on a fresh install of XP or even *nix :) It is also MUCH easier to find 64-bit drivers than it was in the past.

Pros: Nice interface, didn't have any issues finding drivers for any of my hardware, had no issues with the install or activation, plays all my current games just fine and all of the apps I use a daily basis work just fine as well (I'm a sys admin so I use plenty of different tools). Likewise, despite popular belief, it is more secure as well. If you don't believe me, last year Apple had to patch ten times the amount of critical security holes than Microsoft had to for both XP and Vista combined. http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/security/soa/Apple-Mac-less-secure-than-Windows-in-2007-/0,130061744,339284674,00.htm?feed=pt_patch UAC can become a bit of a pain, it can be disabled but I chose to leave it on since it doesn't affect the way most of my programs run. Also a lot of the networking features/functionality are much better than in XP as most of it has been rewritten. Overall I think it's a good change and now is a good time to make the switch since quite a few of the kinks are gone.

Cons: As with every brand new OS there are going to be some issues, my main issues are running some legacy apps. None of them are critical (all of them are just old games to be honest), but it would have been nice for the compatibility mode to work properly.

Overall Review: SP1 seems to have definitely sped things up nicely. But even before SP1 I wasn't having any issues with a slow and/or a non-responsive PC. Just like when XP was originally released, people are complaining that Vista is a resource hog. I do have to agree to an extent, but come on. People always ask for more features in an OS and it does come at a cost, higher hardware requirements. Likewise, everyone complaining about Vista freezing and/or not booting up may want to check their hardware out for possible failures there. Because if Vista were indeed that unstable on a clean install than MS would be in a lot of trouble right now.