Right on the money. I'm still using 3-3.2GHz dual core chips and those suffice for >90% of my needs. The only time I feel held back is for DVD ripping/encoding but even there the slow part is the rip from DVD onto my HDD.
The problem is, we used to have games that ate up CPU power. Now all we have is high resolution gaming that we have to just keep throwing more and more video cards at it and in many cases a processor from 3 years ago will suffice.
Please tell us more. I to am interested in Ham Radio and astronomy. I guess thats the only good thing I ever got from the schooling @ HRCC school . Ironic isn't it . The church that pushed the flat earth hype when they new perfectly well it was round.
In gaming, the difference is about 90W or so. 150W is likely under a power virus like Furmark.
Now that the dust settled and reality of DX11 games set in, the GTX480 is 22% faster on average than the HD5870 and still yet slightly faster than the HD6970 up to 1920x1200.
The equivalent comparison would have an FX-8150 be about 20% faster than 2600k and in 6 months when Ivy Bridge (~ HD6970 refresh equivalent) gets released, the FX-8150 would still be slightly faster.....
The comparison to Fermi makes no sense.
You can't use Bulldozer on its own, you need a motherboard.
At stock speeds, the FX-8150 system consumes about 80W more than a 2500k system.
Here is another review that shows a 70W difference for system:
However, most people here overclock their CPUs. That difference grows to an astounding 250-270W between a 5ghz 2500k and a 4.8ghz FX-8150. Problem is, Bulldozer gains a lot less performance in overclocked states than an overclocked 2500k since it has worse IPC and more aggressive Turbo Boost to begin with. On the contrary GTX480 overclocked better than the HD5870 and Fermi also scales better with overclocking.
So in summary:
- Fermi was faster right out of the gate, and that lead only extended in DX11 games to let the original Fermi still be as fast/faster than an HD6970
- Fermi had better overclocking and scaling when overclocked
- Fermi offered extra features such as superior Tessellation, NV's superior 3D gaming surround, CUDA, PhysX
- Fermi also had more VRAM than the HD5870
- Fermi was 6 months late not 10 months late
- Fermi has allowed NV to retain a 59% desktop discrete market share
- GTX460 was one of the best mid-range cards this generation
- GTX570 is easily as good as the more expensive 6970 and GTX580 is single GPU king atm vs. Bulldozer that looks hopeless against a 2500k and has no shot whatsoever of beating Ivy Bridge.
vs.
- Bulldozer has worse performance, and it gains less performance when overclocked than Sandy
- Bulldozer's power consumption difference vs. an overclocked 2500k skyrockets to well over 200W
- Bulldozer will have 0 chance of beating an Ivy Bridge (Intel's refresh)
- Bulldozer offers 0 extra features over Intel's CPUs that anyone can actually use
- Bulldozer also forces you to buy an AM3+ motherboard that has inferior SATA 3 performance.
- Bulldozer has made a less than stellar 1090T for $160 suddenly exciting again for AMD users......that would be the equivalent of a GTX285 being a better buy than a GTX480....
It makes no sense to even begin to compare Bulldozer to Fermi. Bulldozer is a huge failure in every way imaginable. It is a way worse CPU than Phenom I was since it costs MORE than a faster 2500k.
What church pushed the "flat earth hype"?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_Flat_Earth
The notion that a flat-earth religious stereotype existed in the dark or middle ages is actually a creation of "creative" historical concoctions of more recent times which, much like the proponents of debunked cold-fusion, takes more time to convince people to forget than it took them to think they were right in the first place.
The ARRL is the best source of information on what it takes to get into Ham Radio in the USA, other countries have similar organizations. Since the FCC removed the Morse Code requirement a few years ago the test is mainly electronics, rules, and general practices.
Something like this is what I was refering to when I mentioned sub-orbital atmospheric monitoring.
Astronomy can be as simple as laying in the backyard looking at the stars. There are remote sites that you can buy some telescope time or you can spend a few hundred for your own setup that is capable of taking some nice photos or spend thousands on some pretty elaborate setups. I spent a couple thousand on a 10 inch scope then hooked my Canon 5D up to it (computer controlled scope, computer controlled camera).
Hope this answers some of your questions.
Rather bold statement and really has nothing to do with anything.However, most people here overclock their CPUs.
In gaming, the difference is about 90W or so. 150W is likely under a power virus like Furmark.
Fermi was faster right out of the gate, and that lead only extended in DX11 games to let the original Fermi still be as fast/faster than an HD6970
It makes no sense that certain posters disregard power usage as unimportant or irrelevant when it comes to a video card, but suddenly consider it a huge deal when it comes to a CPU.It makes no sense to even begin to compare Bulldozer to Fermi.
It will always be a fringe hobby, like those dudes who buy metal detectors to look for lost coins in the park and so on.
Rather bold statement and really has nothing to do with anything.
And where do you think the full load power usage numbers come from for bulldozer? Idle power usage for bulldozer is great. In normal daily usage, how often are all 8 cores going to be pegged to full load?
Both figures are equally absurd.
"Power consumption figures for the GeForce GTX 480 are truly terrifying. With a total system consumption of 506 watts under load, it was 22% more power hungry than the Radeon HD 5870. Despite being a single GPU graphics card it used slightly more power than the dual-GPU Radeon HD 5970 at both idle and load, and was comparable to a pair of Radeon HD 5870 graphics cards in Crossfire mode."
http://www.techspot.com/review/263-nvidia-geforce-gtx-480/page13.html
Why are you ignoring the 5970? I mean, I could say "FX-8150 was faster out of the gate compared to the Intel Pentium 4 CPUs", but it would be a rather useless statement. The 480 was only fastest if you ignored the 5970.
It makes no sense that certain posters disregard power usage as unimportant or irrelevant when it comes to a video card, but suddenly consider it a huge deal when it comes to a CPU.
Bulldozer was late, it uses a lot of power, and it's performance is sub-par.
Fermi was late, it uses a hell of a lot of power, and it's performance was somewhat sub-par.
Being late, both were terrible late. I don't think you will argue this point.
Fermi was a lot closer to being legitimately good than bulldozer, but it was still sub-par, a disappointment, below everyone's expectations. People were expecting a clear winner, and instead we got a card that was very hot, expensive, and under-performing.
Then there is the power usage. Bulldozer really isn't bad at all, idle usage is way down compared to previous AMD CPUs, while full load is similar, sometimes higher by 20-30 watts, sometimes lower depending on the test, not too absurd. The 480 used more power than a dual GPU card which beat it by 30+% in nearly everything. Hundreds of watts more vs it's next nearest competitor, which performs nearly as well. That is plenty absurd, IMO.
So they really both pretty sad, IMO, for their own reasons. Bulldozer gets an F for being late and performance, and a D for power usage. Fermi gets an F for being late and power usage, and a C for performance. It makes plenty of sense to begin to compare the two products, given the forum populace's interest in power usage.
Rather bold statement and really has nothing to do with anything.
And where do you think the full load power usage numbers come from for bulldozer? Idle power usage for bulldozer is great. In normal daily usage, how often are all 8 cores going to be pegged to full load?
"Power consumption figures for the GeForce GTX 480 are truly terrifying. With a total system consumption of 506 watts under load, it was 22% more power hungry than the Radeon HD 5870. Despite being a single GPU graphics card it used slightly more power than the dual-GPU Radeon HD 5970 at both idle and load, and was comparable to a pair of Radeon HD 5870 graphics cards in Crossfire mode."
Why are you ignoring the 5970? I mean, I could say "FX-8150 was faster out of the gate compared to the Intel Pentium 4 CPUs", but it would be a rather useless statement. The 480 was only fastest if you ignored the 5970.
It makes no sense that certain posters disregard power usage as unimportant or irrelevant when it comes to a video card, but suddenly consider it a huge deal when it comes to a CPU.
Fermi was late, it uses a hell of a lot of power, and it's performance was somewhat sub-par.
Being late, both were terrible late. I don't think you will argue this point.
Fermi was a lot closer to being legitimately good than bulldozer, but it was still sub-par, a disappointment, below everyone's expectations. People were expecting a clear winner, and instead we got a card that was very hot, expensive, and under-performing.
My point was this: A stock 480 is at least 15% faster than a stock 5870 was. So you'd need to overclock a 5870 to match a stock 480. So what happens to an overclocked FX-8150? Its power consumption goes through the roof. Also, the 2 reasons I mentioned overclocking the FX-8150 is because:
Idle power consumption is good for BD. But what about games or distributed computing or rendering, video encoding (the heavily multi-threaded apps you might buy a BD for in the first place)?
Initially, it was hot, but later samples were very quiet.
.... I don't know what the power usage is during the middle ground cases, I don't think anyone has done a thorough enough review to show. But if bulldozer is losing a lot of benchmarks when the benchmarks are either single threaded or limited to 4 or fewer threads, bulldozer should be using significantly less power due to idle cores. In the few benchmarks that really pushed all cores, bulldozer generally did okay. Battlefield 3 seems to be one of the only games around that scales to 8+ cores, and it seems to run well on bulldozer.
..... You've really gone way out of your way to try to prove things I never disputed. Bulldozer performance sucks, I agree, I've said so myself. It has nothing to do with my post. I was simply pointing out that power usage has been ignored many times in the past when it wasn't convenient for the poster's agenda, while now it's made out to be the biggest problem ever with bulldozer.
It's not.
+1
We are in the same league as those metal detector dudes
Pfft, we are much cooler than those metal detector dudes!
Selling my computer ASAP D:+1
We are in the same league as those metal detector dudes
...... I don't subscribe to the tenets of the flat earth society, nor the tenets of the Young Earth creationism (the earth is 6000 yrs-old beliefs), but I do celebrate them for that which they represent - dissenting viewpoints and a stubbornness to accept a mono-view of the nature of physics based on its static snapshot at any given point in time.
Do the flat earthers or 6k old earthers really have any legitimate scientific basis for their viewpoints?
I don't subscribe to the tenets of the flat earth society, nor the tenets of the Young Earth creationism (the earth is 6000 yrs-old beliefs),
Well you see, the earth actually is 6k years old. Carbon dating indicates otherwise because the flying spaghetti monster has distributed older materiel around the planet just to throw us off. As far as flat earth, curvature of the earth is simply the way we perceive things in 3 dimensional space, while reality is 9 dimensional and "curved" or "flat" are both too simplistic and inaccurate descriptions for anything. Nevermind, I've got nothing.
Ultimately the existence of the 2Win is a major vote of confidence in SLI by EVGA. If you believe as they do that NVIDIA will continue to quickly add SLI support to games, that SLI scaling will always be strong, and that multi-GPU timing issues are easily overcome then the 2Win makes the GeForce GTX 580 redundant at current pricing. Its that simple.
On the other hand if you dont share EVGAs confidence in SLI, then very little has changed. If you believe that new games will have teething issues with SLI, that microstutter will continue to exist, and that not every game will scale well with SLI, then the 2Win is a poor choice in light of the more consistent performance of the GTX 580. Certainly the performance of the 2Win is phenomenal when SLI is working, but if SLI falters that means the performance of the 2Win is reduced to that of a $220 GTX 560 Ti. Its not necessarily a deal breaker, but its a real concern that must be evaluated when buying any dual-GPU card, including the 2Win. Were going to continue to be conservative and recommend the consistency of a single-GPU card over the performance of a dual-GPU card, but for the individual buyer the 2Wins performance makes a very good argument to throw caution into the wind.
Do the flat earthers or 6k old earthers really have any legitimate scientific basis for their viewpoints? Leaving aside flat earth nonsense, I thought the 6k theory is mostly pseudo-scientific mumbo jumbo masquerading as a legitimate science. I agree that there should be more tolerance for viewpoints which may not be politically correct but only if there is room for different interpretations.
This.
Science is based on evidence, and evidence is something debatable.