Intel Core i3-550 vs Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600

Core i3-550 vs Core 2 Quad Q6600 specs and performance

In our benchmarks, the Core 2 Quad Q6600 beats the Core i3-550 in overall performance. Furthermore, our gaming benchmark shows that it also outperforms the Core i3-550 in all gaming tests too.

With info from our database, we find that the Core 2 Quad Q6600 has significantly more cores with 4 cores whereas the Core i3-550 has 2 cores. But they both have the same number of threads. Our comparison shows that the Core i3-550 has a slightly higher clock speed compared to the Core 2 Quad Q6600. A Core i3-550 CPU outputs less heat than a Core 2 Quad Q6600 CPU because of its significantly lower TDP. This measures the amount of heat they output and can be used to estimate power consumption.

The more cores a CPU has, the better the overall performance will be in parallel workloads such as multitasking. Many CPUs have more threads than cores, this means that each physical core is split into multiple logical cores, making them more efficient. Indeed, the Core i3-550 has more threads than cores. Each physical core is split into multiple threads.