is there anyway to unlock a q6600's multi? like jumpering something inside the chip like you had to do on the old Athlon XP palaminos...
Old Athlon XP's all had unlocked multipliers, the switch to socket 775 to athlon 64, they made locked multipliers and unlocked for the fx's.
and yes you can unlock em:
YouTube - Amd Sempron 2200 MOD
old video on a sempron 2200+. what the guy basically does is mods the CPU, takes off a little jumper that locks the multiler, this way its unlocked and he doesn't face the FSB wall of the CPU or motherboard. I wonder if you can take off the metal plate of CPU's now you would still be able to do this... hmm...
the problem with this though is that one mistake, and you lost your $200 CPU, this sempron 2200+ was around $50 at its time, so less risky experimenting on those cheap CPU's.
Also the extremes are cherry picked quads, the best CPU's will be used for em so over clocking expience will be overall better. Intel though seems to have their manufacturing process under control, so a lot of people could clock cheap $80 dual-core pentiums to high 3ghz+. Of course some people are unlucky and get a e6400 that cant clock past 2.6ghz. The new quad x9650 extreme or w/e is 45nm a nice amount of cache so you should be able to clock it slightly more than the 65nm extremes. while the 45nm extreme clocks to 4ghz and the q6600 might clock to 4ghz, its mostly luck that you get a cheap yet well performing mainstream quad.