Choices left for Non Nehalem Owners?

[Denithor]

Originally posted by: Idontcare
Never battle arrogance when at its heart lies ignorance. Unless you fancy to waste your time. Clubbing baby seals with nerf baseball bats, harmless fun but kinda pointless and gets boring after a few years.

:laugh:

 

[Zebo]

The gaming bench marks don't bear out much improvement and frankly that's all I need high powered processors for. Everything else I can do and still do on my stock Athlon XP 1.4Ghz which even controls my home automation. I've thought about upgrading it but it's a nightmare and not needed. Word/excel/email everything works great on it.

 

[Concillian]

Honestly It'll be Wolfdales for a while for me. It's been a while since I've spent more than $100 on a CPU, and that was my first Dual-Core (and it was a nice upgrade over my single core for sure). Who knows when before that. overclocking sub-$100 CPUs seems to be my bag.

I think it's likely I'll be on Wolfdale until we see <$100 32nm refreshes of Nehalem, or whatever competing AMD product is a good value. Overclock the trailing edge and your money buys a lot of CPU. Been doing it since the Pentium Pro 150 days.

 

[faxon]

im honestly not sure what im going to do exactly yet. with deneb looking to be a good chip and AMDs power saving features they have integrated into their systems, vs the known entity that is the amazing performance of a 4GHz yorkfield, im honestly not sure what im going to do yet for a new gaming/multimedia rig just yet to replace my aging (and quite inadequate) A64 4000+. as for my interest in contributing to the F@H project, as well as several other distributed computing projects, i might build a Nehalem test bed specifically for that purpose as soon as their 8 core chips come out and you can get 12GB of DDR3 in 4GBx3 sticks. im probably going to use the rig for messing with virtual machines and server distros of linux also, since im severely lacking in knowledge in that field, and a system with 16 virtual cores (8x2 w/SMT) will be an excellent test bed for that type of thing.

 

[Zenoth]

I'll keep my E8400 and try to make it stable at 4Ghz, quite simply. I'm not planning to get a Quad Core nor Nehalem, I'm not planning to upgrade for at least two or three years (the CPU I mean). I'll just invest in better Motherboard/Memory/GPU combos, because for what I do Quad Cores would be practically useless, and at best would provide negligible advantages.

 

[harpoon84]

Originally posted by: aigomorla

Originally posted by: Ocguy31
8GB of ram? What do you use your computer for?

...

love how all you guys forgot X58 is tri chanel

So that means its either 3 or 6 not 2 or 4

Nehalem can also run in single or dual channel mode, although single channel would be a massive bottleneck. There is however negligible difference between dual and tri-channel:

http://img253.imageshack.us/im...115everestthumbiz7.jpg
http://img511.imageshack.us/im...6265/cod4triplelz1.jpg

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: harpoon84
Nehalem can also run in single or dual channel mode, although single channel would be a massive bottleneck. There is however negligible difference between dual and tri-channel:

http://img253.imageshack.us/im...115everestthumbiz7.jpg
http://img511.imageshack.us/im...6265/cod4triplelz1.jpg

Interesting. Does it have an "unganged" mode too, like Phenom/Deneb?

 

[Magusigne]

Here's my game plan

#1 I'm poor..Prolly be a different story if I had money and didn't blow it on my budget rig earlier this year

#2 games nowadays are "Just" starting to utlize multi-threaded support. In the next year or so I might switch out my C2D with a C2Q to keep up.

#3 Nahalem support will probabaly only be utilized in encoding and photoshop in the near future and take 1-2 years to begin to start translating to high end games

#4 More Ram is a likely choice for now, all those guys saying "8GB of ram...WTF do you need that for?", well Vista likes RAM and 4gb sets are CHEAP so why the F not?

#5 Wait for Nahalems to come out stable anyways..sometimes early adopter
s get burned anyways.

 

[Oyeve]

I will switch when s775 is officially dead.

 

[ThaJollyMan]

And the reason for having a nehalem processor at this point or even a year from now would be what? There arent enough programs out right to really take full advantage of a quad-core. What would anyone need a nehalem(core i7) for except for maybe running a server? If it comes down to wanting an upgrade to a ridiculous processor its going to have to cost as much as my q9450 and actually have a reason for utilizing all cores. Dual core processors perform just as well quad cores when it comes to gaming....and 8-12 cores would be needed for what?

 

[Dadofamunky]

Originally posted by: Idontcare

Originally posted by: clarkey01
I was thinking before, maybe in 6 months, swap out my Q6600 for Q9650 @ 3.6Ghz, Perhaps swap out my 4GB for an 8GB RAM kit..

Make sense ? Or should I wait a year and then get a Nehalem board and CPU?

What are you doing with your computer that you feel a 3GHz quad-core (of any kind - phenom/kenstfield/yorkfield/deneb/nehalem) is holding you back and you would be well-served spending more money to upgrade another 0.6GHz to a 3.6GHz machine?

Personally I hate doing upgrades jsut to gain a 20% performance boost in synthetic benchmarks and maybe half that (10%) in real app performance. But if your time is money than it can always be cost-justified.

If you aren't CPU limited in a way that actually limits you (is it really all that terrible to have your encode jobs take 45min versus 40min?) then you are always better off putting that money into an interest bearing FDIC insured CD and come back in a year to buy hardware at half the price or twice the performance.

Yep. I have no interest in upgrading for awhile. I'm not running into any issues whatever and don't expect to for quite some time. The software is the problem these days, quite frankly. It's lagging VERY far behind.

 

[Dadofamunky]

Originally posted by: aigomorla

Originally posted by: Ocguy31
8GB of ram? What do you use your computer for?

...

love how all you guys forgot X58 is tri chanel

So that means its either 3 or 6 not 2 or 4

Can't wait to see 3 GB DIMMS.

 

[Hugh H]

I am waiting for Nehalem to drop to see if it lowers the price on a q9650.

Even though most games only use one or two cores, RTSs (World in Conflict, Supreme Commander, possibly upcoming Empire: Total War) tend to use more than 2 cores... and I like RTS games.

 

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

The biggest gaming performance boost came from when I upgraded from a 3870 to a 4870 not when i overclocked my 8400 from 3Ghz to 3.6Ghz so, its obvious n clear if I think my system is too slow for pleasurable gaming, than an upgrade in the GPU department is the first thing in order.

I bet my 939 socket with my Opteron 170 and another 4870 will perform pretty good in the games i like. UT3 ctf, COD4, Zombie Panic! CS:S. to name a few..

Unless a new architect returns yields equal to or better than from the P4 to Core2 Duo, there won't be an itch I'll need to scratch

 

[aigomorla]

Originally posted by: harpoon84

Originally posted by: aigomorla

Originally posted by: Ocguy31
8GB of ram? What do you use your computer for?

...

love how all you guys forgot X58 is tri chanel

So that means its either 3 or 6 not 2 or 4

Nehalem can also run in single or dual channel mode, although single channel would be a massive bottleneck. There is however negligible difference between dual and tri-channel:

http://img253.imageshack.us/im...115everestthumbiz7.jpg
http://img511.imageshack.us/im...6265/cod4triplelz1.jpg

And did you forget that tri channel was broken on the X58 boards until reciently? this was very well known on XS. Which is probably why your seeing same performance from dual channel vs tri channel.


Guys no more guessing and assumptions please. We have about 3 more weeks until the X58 rolls out, and about 2 more weeks after when the 965 will come out on a NON BETA platform. <i think well my sponsor is telling me>

B4 you guys make a fool out of yourself, id hold off on the guessing now. Almost everything is finalized and intel is making it very hard for us to speak out without getting a very big yelling.

 

[damage424]

...noob alert...

you guys think the x58/i7 combo will lead to price cuts for p35/p45 and x38/x48 mobos and possibly c2d or c2q cpu's?

 

[Fazzi]

I pulled the trigger last week and awaiting for my order. Based around:
Q9650 OC'd to 4GHz
8GB ram
P5Q Deluxe board
velociraptor 300

(Upgrading from e6600 w/4GB ram Vista 64)

I do tons of Adove Lightroom and Photoshop and video rendering. My last upgrade was 2 yrs ago and my next one will be 2 yrs from now (hopefully the octacores)

Mind you all that the ram above upgrade cost me $130 (much cheaper than the DDR3) and I am not limited by Vdimm, mobo and bios immaturity etc, etc. My workflow cannot stop. I will probably upgrade to 16GB in a year time but that would be all.

Just my 2 cents.


PS - I bet, it will be an interseting read a year from today when we all come back to this thread!!!

 

[PeteRoy]

QX9650 price will be cut? I don't think Intel ever cut prices for their extreme cpu's.

 

[harpoon84]

The Q9650 price should eventually drop to the current Q9550 pricepoint, I really doubt the QX9650 will drop in price though, Intel normally just EOLs old QXs and introduces faster ones.

 

[Kraeoss]

lol... wow a 1k for a chip..... who am i !! freakin gates !?

 

[Drsignguy]

Well seems like the majority is going to wait. Would be interesting to know when and whom ( names wont be mentioned ) get the latest and greatest and post their real world results. I am very curious to see...

 

[Dadofamunky]

Originally posted by: Fazzi
I pulled the trigger last week and awaiting for my order. Based around:
Q9650 OC'd to 4GHz
8GB ram
P5Q Deluxe board
velociraptor 300

(Upgrading from e6600 w/4GB ram Vista 64)

I do tons of Adove Lightroom and Photoshop and video rendering. My last upgrade was 2 yrs ago and my next one will be 2 yrs from now (hopefully the octacores)
...

Hopefully by then at least, Photoshop will actually be a 64-bit application, much less multicore savvy... Heck, we can't even get freakin' Flash in 64-bit!

 

[HannibalX]

I just bought a Phenom 9950 BE and a 790GX motherboard. Hoping I can hit 3.5GHz. Chances are I will have this setup for quite some time. My current FX60 rig is doing just fine really. I didn't need to upgrade, it does everything I need it to including the latest games.

 

[Tempered81]

9950 BE is a good deal for $139, are you going to put a deneb on the 750 SB when it comes out? 4.0ghz phenom?

 

[HannibalX]

I might depending on how the pricing goes. A 4.3GHz Deneb sounds nice to me.