Power Consumption and Energy Cost – Less is more with Dual-Core
For our overall result, the consideration of these systems’ power consumption plays a major role. Since we had to increase the core voltage quite a bit during our overclocking experiments, this has a huge impact on a CPU’s power dissipation, which increases dramatically. 
With both CPUs overclocked to their limit, the dual-core chip’s power consumption increases by 51.6%. Our quad-core’s results are a little higher, increasing by 58.3%.
Once both CPUs are put under a full load, the difference in power consumption between our two candidates becomes much more pronounced. While the dual-core model needs 62.6% more energy under load at its maximum clock speed, the quad-core draws a full 75.3% more compared to its default speed.
Energy Cost
In the end, the cost of an affordable overclocking system is not determined solely by the price of its individual components. The added performance goes hand in hand with higher power consumption – a price you pay in the form of your electric bill at the end of the year. 
We base our calculations on an average usage scenario in which the computer runs for eight hours per day. Our measurements represent the entire system’s power consumption, including the power supply, graphics card, and sound card as well as the hard drive and the DVD-ROM. Since we are interested only in the power consumption of the processors, the graphics card is idle in all measurements.
A Core 2 Duo E6750 will cost you about €120 in electricity over the course of a year when running under load for eight hours a day. Overclocked, it will cost you an additional €21.60.
The bill is much higher for the Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600. Compared to its dual-core sibling, it eats about €20 worth more electricity, or €140. Overclocking does its part to drive the cost up even more, increasing the bottom line on your utility bill by another €42, for a total of €182.
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so what you just said, is the newer stuff is better
i dont know why they take 10 pages to show what can be said in 1 page + a few graphs
On top of that Crysis is meant to be very cpu dependant and prefers 4 cores - it's the way things are going
Hmm, if they'd have gone for a different motherboard they could have gotten the q6600 to 3.6 on air.
Dunno if you have a duff chip or mobo. I have a Q6600 and exactly the same cooler and I can do 3.41 GHz at stock voltage on a Gigabyte 965P-DS3P.
"Its stock clock speed is 2.4 GHz, which it operates at using a comparatively low core voltage of 1.3125 Volts – the lowest core voltage available for this chip"
Wrong my Q6600 is 1.26V although it runs slightly higher in practice.
http://i152.photobucket.com/albums [...] s/Quad.jpg
I guess this shows how OC'ing can vary depending on luck. Even hand picking the best S numbers is no guarantee. A bit of luck (unless you have deep pockets) can be key.
Fortunately for myself, my Q6600 is 1.28v core, and hits 3.6GHz with only slight bump.
Indeed electron migration is a significant issue at high Vcore but realistically most of us overclocking are probably running 6-12 month cycles on our hardware (at least from my experience) and the cost of killing a mid range part every year against taking a top end part is still more cost effective.
That's given only one CPU in the past 15 that I've OC'd have failed (possibly luck?) on me and that was due to a faulty voltage regulator on my motherboard
Very nice review/test. Highly informative. I was gonna buy a 6850 or a quad core but now im just gonna grab the low cost msi board and a 6750 and spent my cash elsewhere.
question, you end up recommending the MSI motherboard, but the test system states that you used the gigabyte for the test. Will i be able to get the same clocking abilities with the MSI?