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Doc Block posted:Unfortunately there are a lot of businesses with no plans whatsoever to upgrade beyond XP in the immediate future. Where I work, we recently picked up a few new business customers after our main competitor dropped support for Windows 2000. Some of them are currently planning their migrations TO Windows XP. The only reason any of my customers even have anything as fast as a Core2 is because they ran out of spare motherboards for their GX280s. The vast majority are still perfectly happy plodding along on Pentium 4s in the low 2GHz range. As a result of this. a 2GHz P4 running XP is still the baseline that we have to develop for, including new software. As for Sandy Bridge, another loving new socket? It seems like only 5 minutes since Intel brought out 2 new sockets for i3/i5/i7 and now they're obsolete already. I'm glad I decided to sit this round out and just stick a 3GHz C2Quad into my X48 board.
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Sep 19, 2010 09:49
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Gembolah posted:Aren't those high-end C2Qs like 300-400 bucks? Basically, that is enough to upgrade to an i5-750 + motherboard + RAM. I'm not sure that was as clever an idea as you think it was... At the time the new models were announced but not really available in my country and the ones you could get were overpriced. Plus I needed my old CPU to upgrade my media centre PC. Point is this PC is doing just fine, my ATI 4870 is the biggest bottleneck. The i3/5/7 was a completely pointless generation, for me, with two worthless sockets that are obsolete after a year. I'm happy to have sat the whole thing out. We'll see if Sandy Bridge is worth bothering with. The GPU isn't as good as my 4870 and I haven't heard much about if the CPU is an improvement, or if there is anything around that needs it. Note that Crysis 2 is going to have lower requirements than the original. Don't care about H264 encoding. I think what I'm getting at is we're even reaching a point where any gaming system from the last couple of years is good enough, with the possible exception of a need for a GPU upgrade, which Sandy Bridge isn't going to deliver.
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Sep 19, 2010 20:47
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People saying that 775 was an exception and you should expect sockets to be short lived need to remember further into the past. Slot A was around for ever, then it was replaced with Socket 7 with which it was electrically compatible and adaptors were available. Lots of people kept their old 440BX boards for years, starting with the likes of a 300MHz Celeron and finishing up on a pIII running over 1GHz. Of course it didn't help that the chipsets designed to replace the 440BX were all terrible. I then went to AMD as the P4 was terrible. I can't even remember the name of the socket (Socket A?) but that socket lasted a long time as well. I think I started with a 1400+ tbird then a 2000+ Athlon XP and finally a 2600+ Athlon-XPM that I harvested from a dead company laptop. I was lucky (poor) enough to skip the Socket 939 debacle and went straight onto 775 with a C2D and later a C2Q. So yeah, to me at least, a socket that lives for only a year is a shameful socket. As for the new chipset features. USB3 I can add with a card if I ever happen across a USB3 device and find it too slow and I guess the new SATA is good for people using SSDs? It's certainly worthless for people using harddrives. Lum fucked around with this message at 08:55 on Sep 20, 2010 |
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Sep 20, 2010 08:53
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Well yes of course you'll need new/different pins to put the GPU on a socket, same as how the last generation needed new pins to handle the onboard memory controller. Just means I'm going to wait until they stop loving about and move everything onto the CPU that they're going to move, then maybe we can have a socket that lasts for more than a year again. Lets face it, until the XBox720 or whatever comes out, there's no need to upgrade your gaming PCs anyway as there wont be any lovely console ports that can use the extra power.
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Sep 20, 2010 23:41
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rscott posted:Uh Socket 7 was for old Pentium/K6-2/3s/Cyrix/etc. Intel went to Slot 1 to prevent AMD CPUs from being pin compatible drop in replacements for their CPUs. Slot 1 and Slot A were mechanically compatible but not pin compatible. Socket 370 was electronically compatible with Slot 1 and Socket 462 was electronically compatible with Slot A, Intel/AMD moved away from the slots because the packaging for the cartridge CPUs was more expensive than for socket based CPUs. You're right, I got the names mixed up. It was a long time ago after all. Doesn't invalidate the point I was making though.
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Sep 22, 2010 14:57
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Zhentar posted:The only thing companies will do if you give them a couple extra years like that is spend a couple years hoping you change your mind. At least it will be more clear cut than the Vista driver support fiasco. It'll either boot or it wont. That said all those people like me with decent gaming rigs who have no plans to upgrade will probably be able to run Windows 8 just fine and will hold off on upgrading if UEFI is a requirement.
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Oct 9, 2010 00:41
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Siroc posted:Then I only have to wait until the beginning of Jan for the i5-2500k? That'd be awesome. Will all these sockets be EFI? Its a new tech, so I'm a little concerned about being a 1st gen beta tester for it. Are there any worries in that regard, or has EFI been tested for a while? Pretty sure that every Intel based Mac uses EFI rather than BIOS.
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Nov 13, 2010 16:32
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Out of interest, are there any games or killer apps due out that actually need this? Right now the only compelling reason to upgrade from my C2Q is to get EFI and faster boot times, but from the discussion in this thread, the early implementations of that are going to be a bit slow and crappy due to legacy support. I'd probably be better off spending the money to upgrade my ageing ATI 4870 but even with that the new 68x0 cards aren't that much faster for the price and I'm starting to wonder if we're nearing peak performance? Basically, give me a reason not to sit out this generation as well as the current one.
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Dec 14, 2010 17:28
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I haven't even begun overclocking my C2Q. 3GHz seems to be plenty and an SSD was the most effective upgrade I've had. My main interest in EFI is to improve boot time. I must be getting old. I guess when the xBox 720 comes out, we'll all need to upgrade to play the latest games.
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Dec 14, 2010 17:43
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BangersInMyKnickers posted:Sleep mode makes that pretty low on my consideration list these days. As for legacy stuff bogging it down, this will mostly depend on how it is implemented. If it is like what Dell did on their servers, the core will be EFI with BIOS emulation layers for legacy components but those can be turned off if not needed. Who knows how other manufacturers will handle it, though I suspect a lot will do a bad job initially. Am I right in thinking that you need EFI drivers for add-in cards to avoid the BIOS emulation layer, and therefore I'll need to hold off on a graphics card update until they start supporting EFI too?
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Dec 14, 2010 19:20
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Marinmo posted:And even if the first EFI implementations are just as bad as BIOS, isn't EFI upgradable in a much more feasible way than BIOS, so that when the actual good implementations arrive, everyone (more or less) can reap the benefits? Only if it can be upgraded without the motherboard manufacturer being required to produce the upgrade, otherwise all but the most current boards will be left to rot as they are currently.
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Dec 14, 2010 21:33
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Dr. Gaius Baltar posted:Boot from your windows cd and do a repair installation. If it's XP then just run SysPrep, assuming the hard drive controller uses the same driver on both systems (ie. ICH*R), otherwise you're in for a world of hurt. If it's Vista or 7 then see the post above.
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Jan 2, 2011 19:01
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VermiciousKnid84 posted:Nah. Is it that crazy to want a gaming machine in a nice, modestly-sized case that's not too loud? This the first time I've heard of a mini-ITX gaming PC. Normally they're used for car stereos or silly "case mods" where they crammed the entire system into a football or something stupid likt that. I'm sure if you stuck a mini ITX board on a table and put a modern graphics card in it, the thing would tip over due to the graphics card being heavier and the one single expansion slot being right on the edge. Sure you're not thinking of Micro ATX?
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Jan 8, 2011 12:27
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