- Jul 6, 2010
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Been busy and put off the upgrade to see what piledriver brought. Wife told me to get myself something since I am stingy on buying myself goodies through the year. Glad to see Piledriver come finally. It wasn't ground breaking but offers a better deal than bulldozer with improvements on power consumption, but nothing to rival Intel. I am still considering an I5 in the 189.99 price range and weighting my options on nvidia cards for SETI and other projects. I am mainly interesting physics, Astronomy, and ET life. So far I am looking into getting an FX 8350 for 189.99 off prime or the FX 8320. Along with a 970x or 990x AMD board for around $100-120. I got 4GB of DDR3 1600 but probably will go up to 8GB or 16GB. I think I'll keep my 5850 with Zalman. I can't get much out of it compared to the performance gains I'll get replacing it. Seems like I'll need at least a 7950 to see much improvement. The thing runs around 40c idle and still puts out enough for milkyway, but I have nothing for Seti@Home last I checked. Anyone had any crunching experiences with piledriver compared to the I5s or old Thubans or Bulldozers?