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For stock the Intel boards are good, for OC'ing not so much. I'd go with either ASUS or Gigabyte for OC'ing. MSI is fine for stock but are mediocre OC'ers IME. Same goes for Asrock and Biostar, at least they're usually cheap though.
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Jan 5, 2011 06:16
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Gigabyte is generally the best for OS X compatibility, Asus boards seem to like to use odd sound codecs or ethernet controllers that are not well supported. Of course all this may change with real UEFI support!
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Jan 5, 2011 06:19
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movax posted:e: my DS3 LGA775 gigabyte board was also DOA I had to wait 6 weeks for a replacement just so it could be DOA as well! So I sent it back but instead of waiting another 6 weeks I got an Asus (worked right away). The good news is that when the next Gigabtye board finally came back, it was long enough that the boards became rare and I sold it for a ~$100 profit. 
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Jan 5, 2011 06:28
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I have a P35-DS3L that I got with my E8400 and it has worked very good for me I just can't overclock my E8400 past 3.4GHz because it is a gimped C0 chip or is it because my motherboard is junk? Unfortunately, I'm going to have to wait until my birthday in April to upgrade at this point because I've run into a budget crunch and now only have $250 to spare. I'll now be forced to watch the Sandy Bridge launch from the sidelines just like every other CPU launch before it. Perhaps I should wait until Ivy Bridge at this point? Have fun with your 4GHz quad-core chips you 
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Jan 5, 2011 06:31
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spasticColon posted:I have a P35-DS3L that I got with my E8400 and it has worked very good for me I just can't overclock my E8400 past 3.4GHz because it is a gimped C0 chip or is it because my motherboard is junk?
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Jan 5, 2011 06:40
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Speaking of Intel boards, it would be so sweet if they would put out a more or less "no-nonsense enthusiast" model around the P67 or upcoming Z68? chipset. No overdoing it with SLI or other overly fancy stuff, just support their own unlocked chips with enough voltage and timing adjustment to give me a fair shot at hitting ~4-4.5ghz on air/stock cooling. Throw in a decent sound chip, Intel networking tidbits, maybe a few USB 3 ports. Why can't we have nice things like this? 
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Jan 5, 2011 06:43
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Woo, it's January 5th now. I wonder what time sandy bridge will show up for sale.
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Jan 5, 2011 06:50
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I don't know where the Jan 5th thing came from (only found reference to it here) as everywhere else is saying the 9th.spasticColon posted:I have a P35-DS3L that I got with my E8400 and it has worked very good for me I just can't overclock my E8400 past 3.4GHz because it is a gimped C0 chip or is it because my motherboard is junk? Unfortunately, I'm going to have to wait until my birthday in April to upgrade at this point because I've run into a budget crunch and now only have $250 to spare. I'll now be forced to watch the Sandy Bridge launch from the sidelines just like every other CPU launch before it. Perhaps I should wait until Ivy Bridge at this point?
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Jan 5, 2011 07:08
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Alereon posted:Reduce the CPU multiplier and keep pushing the FSB up. If it won't go any further, the motherboard is the limiting factor. That wouldn't be too surprising, since the stock FSB is the maximum supported by the chipset, whereas usually when overclocking you use a board with margin to push the FSB up before it hits its limits. For example, on my X48 board you'd just change it from 9*333 to 7.5*400 and bump the multiplier back up one step at a time until the CPU hits its limit or you're up to 3.6Ghz.  Should I disable my current overclock to play it safe?Edit:^^^^Mine runs at about 60-62C under load. Warm but within limits. But when I overvolt the piss out of it to be stable at 3.6 it would get over 70C and that's unacceptable. spasticColon fucked around with this message at 07:21 on Jan 5, 2011 |
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Jan 5, 2011 07:17
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I wouldn't worry about it. Up to 1.40v is generally considered safe for the 45nm CPUs when well-cooled, but my Core 2 Quad Q9550 also hits a wall past 3.4Ghz. 3.4Ghz at 1.30v is fine, but 3.6Ghz requires 1.40v and an excessive amount of tweaking, so I decided it wasn't worth it to try to eek out the last couple hundred Mhz. Every CPU has a point where power usage starts going up near exponentially, it's generally not worth pushing the CPU past that sweet spot.
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Jan 5, 2011 07:22
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R1CH posted:I don't know where the Jan 5th thing came from (only found reference to it here) as everywhere else is saying the 9th. The wikipedia entry lists the release date as January 5th. I hope it's right (but fear it isn't)!
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Jan 5, 2011 07:46
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Hey I didn't see any other good thread to ask this in, but since the new UEFI motherboards are going hand in hand with Sandy Bridge, maybe someone here will know. Is Asus (or anyone else making UEFI boards with potentially awesome GUIs) planning on releasing them with any other sockets besides LGA1155?
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Jan 5, 2011 08:12
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If its the 5th I get to play with mine this weekend. If its the 9th I don't. Guess which one I'm hoping for?
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Jan 5, 2011 08:42
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Red_Mage posted:Hey I didn't see any other good thread to ask this in, but since the new UEFI motherboards are going hand in hand with Sandy Bridge, maybe someone here will know. Is Asus (or anyone else making UEFI boards with potentially awesome GUIs) planning on releasing them with any other sockets besides LGA1155? ASRock has a P67 LGA 1156 Lynnfield board (http://www.asrock.com/mb/overview.asp?Model=P67%20Transformer) coming out with UEFI. Apart from that, I don't really know. Also, for some reason I imagine ASRock as the weird motherboard maker. I had one that allowed me to use a socket 754/DDR2 on an Socket A/DDR1 motherboard, and now they shoehorned a P67 into LGA1156 David Tennant fucked around with this message at 12:05 on Jan 5, 2011 |
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Jan 5, 2011 12:02
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Looks like that tip was spot on. MC will have the i5 2500K for $180 in store on the 9th. Looks like their motherboard prices are about on par with the online stores' prices too. Already got my cheap 8GB of DDR3. I'll keep the rest of my system for now though since nothing I play is still stressing my GPU's too much.
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Jan 5, 2011 15:49
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movax posted:It looks like the Q6600 doesn't have VT-d. I don't feel qualified to advise you on a purchasing decision solely based on this feature (you might have better luck in the Virtualization megathread), but part of feels that the higher clocks + hyper-threading of SNB would make up for some overhead lost by lacking VT-d. Despite the minuses, Sandy Bridge architectural features beyond the Core 2 series other than VT-d dropping make up for the difference pretty handily, but I wouldn't be surprised if on certain obscure-to-regular-users benchmarks i7 systems do significantly better than the 2500K and 2600K chips. Overall I'd say there's nothing to be lost going from a Q6600 to a Sandy Bridge chip and that it's not as clear-cut from Nehalem to Sandy Bridge (until those Xeons are released that is). I'm still probably going to build myself an AMD based compute infrastructure for my home datacenter because I'm a cheapass and Intel's market segmentation wants to run trains on my wallet.
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Jan 5, 2011 20:11
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Between this thread and the hardware building megathread, I'm glad I stopped in and found out about the new Sandy Bridge chipset. Looks like I'm going to hold off on upgrading my gaming rig until actual prices are released. If anybody is interested there are some reviews/benchmarks of the i5-2500K, i7-2600K, and the P8P67 motherboards at http://benchmarkreviews.com/
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Jan 5, 2011 21:29
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If you're deciding on a P8P67 or upwards from Asus and still own an IDE DVD drive/burner, you'll be needing a SATA one. No IDE port on them.
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Jan 5, 2011 22:15
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necrobobsledder posted:The hardware virtualization acceleration features provided by VT-d are of great importance when your VMs are heavily loaded or you're latency sensitive (graphics, animation). Disk I/O is not really affected by these instructions unless you're running some high-throughput I/O on that desktop system. This is part of why it made sense for VT-d to be removed from baseline Sandy Bridge processors - who the heck running VMs at home has those requirements?
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Jan 6, 2011 01:03
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movax posted:Also you can toss Biostar/ECS/PCChips on the lower end as well. Biostar's decent enough - in my experience, their boards occasionally have issues, but for the most part they're OK if you're on a budget. ECS is just crap. PC Chips, if they're even still around (I thought they were folded completely into ECS since the merger?) are goddamn digital Hitler. As for Asrock, I'd agree with the "weird" assessment. Their basic boards are OK, but they've made their name with wacky stuff like that double-dual-fuel LGA 775 board that could take either AGP or PCIe, and either DDR or DDR2. japtor posted:Mac users trying to run Windows games? You're better off dual-booting, at least for the moment. VT-d makes it possible for guest OSes to directly access stuff like the GPU, but the GPU and host OS's drivers have to support the functionality as well.
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Jan 6, 2011 01:29
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Two videos have been posted from Anandtech's in-depth Sandy Bridge Q&A with Intel. Man, I remember when Anand was 14 and writing about the AMD K6-3 
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Jan 6, 2011 01:43
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PC LOAD LETTER posted:Looks like that tip was spot on. MC will have the i5 2500K for $180 in store on the 9th. Looks like their motherboard prices are about on par with the online stores' prices too. Any idea if this is going to be one of those things where you have to show up at 5 in the morning and wait in line all morning to save a token amount of money only to find out that they only have 6 available processors? I called the local (hour away) Microcenter and they said they won't say how many they have.
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Jan 6, 2011 02:48
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Maybe not 5am, but before they open sure if you want to be certain you get parts on launch day.
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Jan 6, 2011 07:47
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why the hell do they advertise the full price BEFORE the savings? shouldn't it be the other way around?
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Jan 6, 2011 08:04
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Geno posted:why the hell do they advertise the full price BEFORE the savings? shouldn't it be the other way around?
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Jan 6, 2011 08:10
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Tech Report put up a nice review & test of four major brand SB mobos yesterday, it's a good read. http://techreport.com/articles.x/20190
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Jan 6, 2011 18:31
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Hardick Hertzer posted:Tech Report put up a nice review & test of four major brand SB mobos yesterday, it's a good read. Nice! Sad to see no UEFI on the Gigabyte board, but looks like there are still a huge number of options present. The Intel board is surprisingly shiny though (and a sane slot layout :yay:)
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Jan 6, 2011 18:59
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Wow, this seems like a really bad time to build a gaming PC. I was going to get an i7 950, but the i7 2600k is the same price. I really, really wish I could wait for LGA 2011. Is it even worth getting the i7 2600k over the i7 950? I'll probably get angry when LGA 2011 comes out and upgrade to it anyway.
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Jan 6, 2011 19:16
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BLOWTAKKKS posted:Wow, this seems like a really bad time to build a gaming PC. I was going to get an i7 950, but the i7 2600k is the same price. I really, really wish I could wait for LGA 2011. If you're just gaming, an i5 would be better than both. Also, you should probably stop getting angry over computer hardware.
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Jan 6, 2011 19:27
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Sorry, I just haven't been able to play PC games for about a year now, and when I finally get ready to jump back in, I have to wait almost another year in order to get a powerful computer. But I guess I can just forget about what's coming later for the meantime and get a "good-enough" PC for now. By an i5 being better, do you mean the price for performance is better? I'm kind of tempted to get the i5 2500k to save money, but the hyperthreading on the 2600k sounds nice. If it's not worth it, I guess I can save 100 bucks.
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Jan 6, 2011 19:38
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BLOWTAKKKS posted:Wow, this seems like a really bad time to build a gaming PC. I was going to get an i7 950, but the i7 2600k is the same price. I really, really wish I could wait for LGA 2011. I think that, for gaming anyway, the i5 2500k would be plenty. edit: beaten
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Jan 6, 2011 19:43
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BLOWTAKKKS posted:Sorry, I just haven't been able to play PC games for about a year now, and when I finally get ready to jump back in, I have to wait almost another year in order to get a powerful computer. But I guess I can just forget about what's coming later for the meantime and get a "good-enough" PC for now. You're grossly overestimating the requirements of current and near-future games. Most don't tax the processor very hard at all; you can build a good gaming system with a $100 Athlon II X4. Those games that do hit the CPU hard often only load up one thread at a time, and the current focus in the high-end market is on heavily parallel processing. You'd be much better off putting the money towards a faster GPU rather than a faster CPU. Game requirements these days are much more heavily weighted towards the graphics side of things, although it's easy to get way out into diminishing-returns territory there, too. You probably don't need a top-of-the-line video card unless you run a fairly exotic setup (2560x1600, 3x1920x1080, 3D, or something along those lines). As for hyperthreading, it's very useful in easily parallelizable tasks, like compression or video encoding. However, it's very difficult to write a game engine that spreads its CPU load out evenly over a bunch of threads. Right now, there are a handful of games that will see (largely theoretical) performance gains from a quad-core CPU; it's still possible to get by with a fast dual, but building a gaming system with a quad is a good idea these days. However, nobody's yet moved to take advantage of eight threads, and based on the way the market's been moving they won't for several years. Look at the early quad-core adopters - they paid $800-1000 for their chips, often in gaming systems, and now that quads are finally useful for games you can grab one for $100 (and the early adopters are looking to upgrade, if they already haven't). Hyperthreading will probably go the same way: by the time there's a game which will actually take advantage of eight threads, you'll be buying a new CPU whether you buy the i5 or i7 today.
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Jan 6, 2011 20:04
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Thanks for the responses. I can put the money I save towards something that will boost performance by more. There's nothing I really need the 8 threads for right now. I've been reading too many forums where people dickwave their CPUs.
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Jan 6, 2011 20:24
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Hardick Hertzer posted:Tech Report put up a nice review & test of four major brand SB mobos yesterday, it's a good read. Nice to see the P67 SATA ports outperforming the Mavell SATA 6Gbps solution. The AMD one too. Kind of annoyed at how expensive those boards are though, but I guess that's cause I just have to have a board that uses the Intel GBE
WhyteRyce fucked around with this message at 21:07 on Jan 6, 2011 |
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Jan 6, 2011 20:56
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If you want to know what hardware game developers will be be focusing on for their future releases, check out Valve's Steam Hardware & Software Survey. I know for a fact that game developers (besides Valve) use these charts to look for trends and set the hardware requirements for their games. For example, XP support is dying rapidly and it's certainly not the focus for game dev studios. The speed of Win7/Vista adoption is actually rather surprising.
Hank Killinger fucked around with this message at 21:15 on Jan 6, 2011 |
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Jan 6, 2011 20:57
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Hank Killinger posted:I'm kind of surprised at how dominant Nvidia is, I had assumed that ATI surpassed them this past couple of generations.
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Jan 6, 2011 22:49
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^^^^^^ ATI has been ahead for roughly a year, with the average upgrade cycle probably being something like 3-5 years it looks about rightWhyteRyce posted:Nice to see the P67 SATA ports outperforming the Mavell SATA 6Gbps solution. The AMD one too. What about the intel DP67BA? I'm thinking of getting that board, it has an intel gbit port, and is "cheap" compared to anything else with it. If you aren't planning on crossfire / SLI it might work. According to http://techreport.com/articles.x/20190/13 you can overclock the locked chips by up to 400mhz, this is the first time I heard of that though, can anyone confirm? Ika fucked around with this message at 22:58 on Jan 6, 2011 |
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Jan 6, 2011 22:51
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Ika posted:According to http://techreport.com/articles.x/20190/13 you can overclock the locked chips by up to 400mhz, this is the first time I heard of that though, can anyone confirm?
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Jan 6, 2011 23:07
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Goldmund posted:I'm kind of surprised at how dominant Nvidia is, I had assumed that ATI surpassed them this past couple of generations. Most people don't run out and replace their video card for every new "generation." If you go to the detailed statistics, you'll see that the ATI 4800 series are the single most popular card, and ATI has three of the top five, but a whole lot of people are hanging on to their 8- and 9-series Nvidia cards. Which isn't surprising, really - they were dynamite at the time, and still hold up fairly well.
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Jan 6, 2011 23:15
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Alereon posted:Yes, this has been known since the technical preview articles. You're basically exploiting the Turbo Boost modes. But doesn't it only boost one of the cores? I may have misread that on another site.
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Jan 6, 2011 23:22
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