Q6600 was quite good but E8400 was the best.

Q6600 is the spiritual successor to the ABIT BP6 Dual Celeron option: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABIT_BP6

ABIT was a legend in motherboards. I used their AN-7 Ultra and AN-8 Ultra. No newer board gave the flexibility and capabilities of these series.

My latest ASUS was good enough, but I didn't (and probably won't) build any newer systems, so ABITs will have the crown.

The ABit BP6 bought me so much "cred" at LAN Parties back in the day - the only dual socket motherboard in the building, and paired with two Creative Voodoo 2 GPUs in SLI mode, that thing was a beast (for the late nineties).

I seem to recall that only Quake 2 or 3 was capable of actually using that second processor during a game, but that wasn't the point ;)

E8400 was actually good, yes

What? It was outstanding for the time, great price performance, and very tunable for clock / voltage IIRC.

Well overclocked I don't know, but out-of-the box single-core performance completely sucked. And in 2007 not enough applications had threads to make it up in the number of cores.

It was fun to play with but you'd also expect the higher-end desktop to e.g. handle x264 videos which was not the case (search for q6600 on videolan forum). And depressingly many cheaper CPUs of the time did it easily.

I owned one, it was a performant little chip. Developed my first multi core stuff with it.

I loved it, to be honest.

65nm tolerated a lot of voltage. Fun thing to overclock.

Really? I never owned one but even I remember the famous SLACR, I thought they were the hot item back then

It was "hot" but using one as a main desktop in 2007 was depressing due to abysmal single-core performance.