At first this just appears to be a fairly standard quad core processor from intel. Decent value for money, decent speed, nothing amazing. But realy, its some what of a hidden gem, thanks to one thing. Overclocking. The stock speed is faily low at 2.4 GHz, but if coupled with a good motherboard and good cooling, it can be pushed to much further. I got mine running incredibly stable (tested for 6 hours on prime 95) running at 3 GHz fairly easily. This means that this processor is great for a gaming enthusiast on a budget, who can afford the latest core i7s (like me...) If you have a decent graphics card (i have a nvidia 8800 GT) then it will easily be able to handle crysis on medium/high settings, which is excellent. It is also a very good choice for a media center setup, if you dont overclock it, it easly handles any decoding task you trow at is, and is relitivly quite at stock speed with a decent fan. Overall, the Q6600 is a great value processor, and will be for some time.