I was going to wait for Sandy Bridge but...

[exar333]

Dude what is your problem? The Opteron 165 at $100 is certainly consumer level. Why are you so caught up in your own personal definitions of which product is at which "level"? Does it make you feel better after having spent $500 on your CPU?

I don't care what you want to define these things as. My point stands that for $100, the following processors have been easily overclockable to become the fastest CPU on the market:

Celeron 300A to 450mhz
Athlon XP "mobile barton" to 2500mhz
Opteron 165 to 2700mhz

You pointed out some good examples of budget CPUs being very competitive, but they weren't "the best". You could get the fastest-binned XPs >2600mhz in some cases; the FX-series A64s could get ~3000mhz.

I would say that $150-200 is now the price-range that you can usuaully OC to get 80-90% of the speed of the top consumer CPUs. For example, you could get your i7 920 to about 4ghz, but you could get the 965 to 4.4-4.5 more consistently. This doesn't take away from the great OC bargain the 920 was, but it wasn't the best if you absolutely needed the highest clock.

 

[aigomorla]

Dude what is your problem? The Opteron 165 at $100 is certainly consumer level. Why are you so caught up in your own personal definitions of which product is at which "level"?

Celeron 300A to 450mhz
Athlon XP "mobile barton" to 2500mhz
Opteron 165 to 2700mhz

Dude... the Opteron 165 was NOT 100 dollars at launch.

Are we talking downgraded prices or Launch prices?

I paid a very heafty penny for my Opty over a Manchester.
Dont even get me started on how expensive the 175 was which was probably my all time monster clocking Opty.

And yes ive been on Celly 300A's and also overclocked Bartons.

Does it make you feel better after having spent $500 on your CPU?

Excuse me... would you like to see what im demoing right now?

Do you think a lower bin'd chip has any shot at breaking any benchmarks over this guy?
Straight up answer..

NO.

You guys are hating the people on the top tier eq why?
Because your bank accounts cant afford it?

That's how this thread is starting to sound..

Like all things in life... You get what you pay for.... if overclocking is your hobby, you get all you can out of a good EE chip.
More then what you could get out of a low end chip.

Dont believe me? Ask Gillbot, his EE chip addiction is a direct result of knowing me so long.

I'm guessing you've never heard of the Celeron 300A? I had two of them running on a cheap Abit motherboard, both overclocked to 450mhz. Nothing could touch them at the time. The same goes for my PII 233 that I highly overclocked to be equivalent to Intel's fastest CPU at the time.

Does this apply NOW?

DUDE, is it too hard to understand... now is not then?

Motherboards were half made in the US back then, now there all made in china.
Can you say NOW is THEN?

 

[VirtualLarry]

It's kind of like this:

Celly 300A -> Budget gamer/overclocker
PII 300 SL2W8 -> more in line with "enthusiast".

Both chips could OC to 450, but the PII was more expensive, and gave better performance, due to larger L2 cache.

Then again, I knew people with multi-proc PII Xeon servers. Now that would be "enterprise" gear.

 

[Will29j]

So is it worth getting the i5 760 now?

 

[aigomorla]

So is it worth getting the i5 760 now?

no..

with SB launch very close, your best off waiting.

The worst case scenario, is they will run out of the 760, however, introduction of SB will make the i7 800 series drop in price.

So you will get a better processor @ the same price of the 760.

 

[taltamir]

Not necessarily. All of the cores are cut from the same wafer in most cases. In the case of the mobile barton I mentioned, they were among the best chips available as they needed to run at a lower voltage.

1. Binning: the highest quality chips are binned as more expensive ones.
2. unlocked multiplier
3. We are talking about a population of chips, not an individual chip. It is possible but unlikely that the worlds best chip got incorrectly binned and sold at a much lower end product. But it is not very plausible (due to a variety of reasons), and regardless it doesn't apply to the population at large. The higher end chips consistently over-clock higher.

 

[SickBeast]

Does this apply NOW?

DUDE, is it too hard to understand... now is not then?

That's my whole point. NOW because of people like you, Intel is able to get away with charging $200+ for a CPU that has even a glimmer of hope when it comes to overclocking.

BTW just because I overclock low-end chips it doesn't mean anything about my financial stature. I would donate money to charity before I would give Intel even a dime toward their fascist approach to the lower-end of the market.

You always have excuses and point at this that and the other thing instead of accepting anyone else's arguments. I say one thing, then you say "oh, but that's not an enthusiast". Then I make another point and you're like "that's not a consumer-level chip". WTF. If you can't win an argument, why don't you just stay out of it instead of pulling this crap.

 

[SickBeast]

1. Binning: the highest quality chips are binned as more expensive ones.
2. unlocked multiplier
3. We are talking about a population of chips, not an individual chip. It is possible but unlikely that the worlds best chip got incorrectly binned and sold at a much lower end product. But it is not very plausible (due to a variety of reasons), and regardless it doesn't apply to the population at large. The higher end chips consistently over-clock higher.

The difference is negligible and doesn't come close to accounting for the additional cost, even if price is no object. The money can always be used toward another aspect of the system.

 

[taltamir]

The difference is negligible and doesn't come close to accounting for the additional cost, even if price is no object. The money can always be used toward another aspect of the system.

which is a wordy way of trying to avoid admitting you were wrong. Negligible or not, the "extreme" chips overclock better.

 

[SickBeast]

which is a wordy way of trying to avoid admitting you were wrong. Negligible or not, the "extreme" chips overclock better.

Not really. All I was saying was that the low-end chips could be overclocked to perform like the high-end ones at stock. I was not implying anything about overall overclockability.

 

[edplayer]

The lack of overclocking on the platform killed it for me. Why should I pay $200+ for a "K" chip that can overclock, when I can get a Phenom II and a motherboard for $140? I did just that and am running happily at 3.8ghz.

I just don't understand Intel. To me, this just proves that they do not care about the enthusiast market.

I would have waited for Bulldozer but the Black Friday deal I got was too good to pass up on.

So I looked at your first post again,

Doesn't look to me like overclocking "killed it" for you. In the 2nd sentence you admit it can overclock.


Its the price that did it. No problem with me but don't try to blame Intel for not allowing you to overclock when we can clearly see that your problem is with the price.

 

[edplayer]

BTW just because I overclock low-end chips it doesn't mean anything about my financial stature. I would donate money to charity before I would give Intel even a dime toward their fascist approach to the lower-end of the market.

Really?

Were you expecting to buy a Sandy Bridge cpu for 9 cents or less? Your thread title says you were waiting for a Sandy Bridge...

 

[SickBeast]

I was waiting for a low-end Sandy Bridge chip that would hopefully cost around $100. Once I read that they could not be overclocked I jumped on the AMD deal I found. I'm quite happy with my decision ATM. Time will tell whether or not I made the right move.

 

[smakme7757]

That's my whole point. NOW because of people like you, Intel is able to get away with charging $200+ for a CPU that has even a glimmer of hope when it comes to overclocking.

BTW just because I overclock low-end chips it doesn't mean anything about my financial stature. I would donate money to charity before I would give Intel even a dime toward their fascist approach to the lower-end of the market.

And you think that if AMD had the best chips they would still sell them at bargain prices?

I think it's great you can get by with budget chips, but at the end of the day AMD will charge mega money (just like Intel) if their chips were the best on the market. At the moment AMDs chips are unfortunatly not up to par and because of this Intel has market dominance, in both speed and revenue.

 

[Rifter]

And you think that if AMD had the best chips they would still sell them at bargain prices?

I think it's great you can get by with budget chips, but at the end of the day AMD will charge mega money (just like Intel) if their chips were the best on the market. At the moment AMDs chips are unfortunatly not up to par and because of this Intel has market dominance, in both speed and revenue.

This x 1000, it has nothing to do with people buying the chips at the price intel is charging it has everyhting to do with performance. When the P4's were blowing chunks and the A64's hit AMD was doing the same thing intel is now with $1000 CPU price tags for the high end CPU's.

 

[BLaber]

Check Anand's findings at the link below:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3877/...investigation-of-thuban-performance-scaling/7

Notice how a stock Phenom II at 3.2GHz/2GHz NB is averaging 51 fps. Once it's OCed to 4GHz/3GHz NB, the fps jumps to 73, that's a 43% increase in performance from only a 25% CPU overclock! The secret here is in the NB frequency which SC2 benefits a lot from, that's why Phenom owners should OC both the CPU and NB to get the highest gain possible.

Absolutely right mate , check this review : Phenom II x6 CPU@4.2ghz ,NB@2.9ghz vs Core I7 860 CPU@4.2Ghz ,NB@3.6Ghz http://translate.google.ro/translat...amd-phenom-ii-x6-1090t-deneb-a-crescut-mare/5..... performance difference between PhenomII & Core I7 at those speeds in not much.. it swings both the ways by little.

 

[Kuzi]

Thank-you very much for posting that, along with your link. I was under the impression that the HT link speed had no effect on performance. I'm now running it at 2700mhz with a moderate bump to the CPU HT link voltage. :thumbsup::thumbsup:

You welcome bro. But I want to make sure we are talking about the same thing. You see AMD CPUs have an HT frequency and a NB (memory controller) frequency, from the tests I've seen, overclocking the HT frequency doesn't improve performance, and actually might degrade it.

Just run CPU-Z and click the "Memory" tab, you will see the "NB Frequency" there. It's 2000MHz by default, if it's showing you 2700MHz then you have OCed the NB correctly

Absolutely right mate , check this review : Phenom II x6 CPU@4.2ghz ,NB@2.9ghz vs Core I7 860 CPU@4.2Ghz ,NB@3.6Ghz http://translate.google.ro/translate...crescut-mare/5..... performance difference between PhenomII & Core I7 at those speeds in not much.. it swings both the ways by little.

Thanks for the link.

 

[amenx]

And you think that if AMD had the best chips they would still sell them at bargain prices?

I think it's great you can get by with budget chips, but at the end of the day AMD will charge mega money (just like Intel) if their chips were the best on the market. At the moment AMDs chips are unfortunatly not up to par and because of this Intel has market dominance, in both speed and revenue.

Yep. AMD price list June 2005:

X2 4800+ $999
X2 4600+ $822
X2 4400+ $619
X2 4200+ $579

 

[BBMW]

Did everyone think that the chip mfgrs were not going to take control of overclocking at some point? It's not like this was a secret, and it's not like the couldn't control if if they felt it necessary.

The whole idea of overclocking is to get something extra for free. It would be stupid for the mfgrs not to try to either charge for the priviledge directly, or take advantage of the headroom themselves. Of course, that has the effect of eliminating the advantage of overclocking.

 

[Edrick]

The whole idea of overclocking is to get something extra for free. It would be stupid for the mfgrs not to try to either charge for the priviledge directly, or take advantage of the headroom themselves. Of course, that has the effect of eliminating the advantage of overclocking.

+1

I am actually surprised this did not happen sooner.

The fact that Intel is only charging a small fee ($20-$30) to have completely unlocked chips is really nice. We used to have to buy extreme edition chips ($999) in order to get that. So I see these K-series as a very good thing for almost everyone.

It is only a matter of time before AMD follows suit.

 

[toyota]

Yep. AMD price list June 2005:

X2 4800+ $999
X2 4600+ $822
X2 4400+ $619
X2 4200+ $579

wow, towards the end of 2006 I bought an entire brand new pc with a 5000 X2 for $600.

 

[amenx]

wow, towards the end of 2006 I bought an entire brand new pc with a 5000 X2 for $600.

Courtesy of Intel and C2D.

 

[Agashka]

And I was waiting for the Sandy Bridge, but considering the big upgrade I'll be doing, I can pass on overclocking
Looks like you got a good deal tho.

 

[SickBeast]

This x 1000, it has nothing to do with people buying the chips at the price intel is charging it has everyhting to do with performance. When the P4's were blowing chunks and the A64's hit AMD was doing the same thing intel is now with $1000 CPU price tags for the high end CPU's.

I just think that Intel has reached a new level of arrogance and dominance. They are acting the way they did during the days of the Pentium and Pentium 2.

Why do we need a new socket for Sandy Bridge, anyway? It still uses DDR3 memory. Intel loves to force people to buy more motherboards by changing sockets, landfills be damned. :thumbsdown::thumbsdown:

 

[SickBeast]

Just run CPU-Z and click the "Memory" tab, you will see the "NB Frequency" there. It's 2000MHz by default, if it's showing you 2700MHz then you have OCed the NB correctly

Yeah, it's showing up there in CPU-Z. Thank-you for confirming.

I actually backed the speed down to 2400mhz because I needed to raise the CPU-NB voltage too much to keep things stable at 2700mhz, plus I was reading that all that you need is 3 times the base speed of your memory (in my case I have DDR 1333, so 666x3=2000mhz).

Perhaps with better cooling I can get my NB up to 3000mhz. Ideally I would like to run my CPU at 4ghz as it will put my memory at exactly 1333mhz with a 1:2 divider.