Q6600 or wait for Penryn?

[kknd1967]

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[T2k]

Originally posted by: Acanthus

Originally posted by: o1die
Check pricewatch ads for "go" stepping, and ask for it. Only some venders guarantee it. I would also skip overclocking unless your room temp is always in the low 70's and you have excellent case airflow.

Tankguys and ClubIT have garunteed stepping.

True. I first ordered from TG but they kept pushing it back so I cancelled and decided to sit out 'til X38 arrives. Took a a while... got a reminder about ClubIT and tried them - worked ver well. They had better price than others and indeed sent me a SLACR Q6600.

 

[T2k]

Originally posted by: isandu
Soo... what do you think? Do you think Penryn is worth waiting for in January / February?

It depends but I was facing the same question and I decided to go ahead and buy a Maximus X38 /w Q6600.
If you're only mildly OC'ing a G0 step Q6600 in a good board then I don't think Penryn will makes too much of a difference anyway, so you can buy now. If it makes, it's still easier to sell the now-$280 Q6600 for $200 and buy a then-$300 Q9450 and just pop into your X38 board then sell whatever already outdated CPU you have now.

Nehalem will force you to buy a new mobo anyway so I'll keep running my new Q6600SLACR or Penryn at or above 4GHz until Nehalem and its chipsets work out fine (and we don't even know what AMD has up in its sleeve).

EDIT: Oh, I forgot to mention, another reason for me to wait for Penryn is that Core 2 architecture has bugs, although I heard they fixed some of these in the G0 revision.

This is nonsense. Every CPU has bugs but these are extremely rare issues and usually well-contained by sw updates.

 

[T2k]

Originally posted by: isandu

And, even if Phenom is going to be better than Core 2, I think AMD will try to sell it for the highest price that it can, to make up for all it's losses in the last year; so I don't think that will affect Intel's prices.

That's would be the stupidest thing to do, it would be a suicidal step by AMD after they lost the market they just conquered from Intel during the pre-Core period.
Desktop business 101: try to grab market share, sell a LOT with less profit so you will be the #1 choice instead of selling less with higher profit and remaining a niche maker.

 

[Acanthus]

Originally posted by: T2k

Originally posted by: isandu
Soo... what do you think? Do you think Penryn is worth waiting for in January / February?

It depends but I was facing the same question and I decided to go ahead and buy a Maximus X38 /w Q6600.
If you're only mildly OC'ing a G0 step Q6600 in a good board then I don't think Penryn will makes too much of a difference anyway, so you can buy now. If it makes, it's still easier to sell the now-$280 Q6600 for $200 and buy a then-$300 Q9450 and just pop into your X38 board then sell whatever already outdated CPU you have now.

Nehalem will force you to buy a new mobo anyway so I'll keep running my new Q6600SLACR or Penryn at or above 4GHz until Nehalem and its chipsets work out fine (and we don't even know what AMD has up in its sleeve).

EDIT: Oh, I forgot to mention, another reason for me to wait for Penryn is that Core 2 architecture has bugs, although I heard they fixed some of these in the G0 revision.

This is nonsense. Every CPU has bugs but these are extremely rare issues and usually well-contained by sw updates.

Very true, look up "errata" and youll find theres glitches in all CPUs from the 386 to current. Some are fixed by bios updates, some are fixed by new processor steppings, some are never fixed. 99.9999% of the time they are so obscure in nature that you never know the exsist.

The only major errata i can think of in recent times is the Pentium Pro Float errata, and the 1.13ghz Pentium 3 coppermine (which had more to do with intel pushing the chip beyond its yield than actual errata).

 

[hans007]

i'd figure a q9300 would be maybe slightly faster than a q6600. then again you are waiting 2-3 months.

but it would save electricity and probably o/c a little better.

it is 2.5 ghz so 100 mhz more, slightly more efficient, better at sse4 BUT it has 6mb cache and not 8mb. i would figure another month before the prices really got close to the $266 list. so you are looking at january.

you can already find used q6600s for $220 now, and new ones sometimes for $240 or so if you are ok with b3 stepping. i would say it might just be too long to wait.