M6400 compatible CPUs

Some time ago I went on eBay to buy a CPU upgrade for my M6400. I bought a Q9100 without paying attention to the fine print in the ad, and ended up with an engineering sample of a Core 2 Quad Extreme QX9100. While this chip has performed flawlessly under Windows and Linux, it seems to be causing some issues with OS X and it appears I need an officially supported CPU. Does anyone have such a list?

 

Are you looking for top end CPU or something in between?

The top end will be Core 2 Quad Extreme QX9300. Mobile CPUs of the same family and same pinout will work on your M6400.

 

I was just a little confused about the difference between the Qxxxx, Txxxx, and Pxxxx processor lines and which ones would work properly. Looking at Intel's ARK helped some. It appears I need a CPU with socket P and a 1066 Mhz bus. I guess it's possible an 800MHz FSB CPU would work, but I probably don't want to take a chance. I was hoping for an official list of supported CPUs from Dell, but there doesn't appear to be one, nor even a list of CPUs that the M6400 originally shipped with.

At this point I'm not looking for a top-end quad CPU, but a low-end quad or high end dual.

 

Says you already have the Q9100, if that's the case the only upgrade is the QX9300. Mine runs at 3.0ghz most of the time, and i have a 3.3ghz setting for some games that require the extra kick.

 

My mistake. I mistakenly purchased a Q9100 engineering sample, which has turned out to be incompatible with a few apps I run. I had to downgrade back to my original T9550 (C2D @ 2.6 GHz) to run the software I wanted to. Now I'm trying to figure out which $40 chip would be better - the Q9000 or T9900.

 

What luck for you, I have had them both and run them in my M6400 and my now gone M4400. Between the two I would lean more towards the T9900 still, most programs still can't utilize 4 cores well, and the overall system felt faster on the T9900. If your into gaming at all the T9900 delivered better performance in around 80% of the games played on the system when both chips were installed. If you have a task where u can max out the 4 cores on the Q9000 then it was around 15% faster overall above the T9900. Both the chips can have an extra 200mhz squeezed out of them in the M6400 using throttlestop.

 

I agree with @GeforcerFX

In your case the C2D T9900 would be a better bet.

See here: http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Core2-Quad-Q9000-vs-Intel-Core2-Duo-T9900