Intel Core i7 Processors [models & pricing] ! !

[saint-francis]

Nope not buying it.
I can't tell you how many times I've upgraded board, card and CPU, and RAM, in the reign of 775 Socket. As always, incremental changes and optimizations are bound to come as the architecture matures. It is my opinion that now is the time to hop on that high end or performance 775 train and ride it out for about a year or year and a half till the price comes down, the technology matures, and the software catches up to it.

I agree. You know that the motherboards will change drastically in the first year if nothing else even of the processors don't (highly doubtful). Remember the cheesy boards we had to deal with when Conroe hit the market? That was only 2 years ago. I figure I'll continue to run my Q6600 into the ground and when it's finally hosed I'll get some 45 nm quad for short money. When that's toast or I think that the Nehalem market is stabilizing I'm going to make a powerhouse with one of them. Then I'm going to treat it as a server; offload all of my video encoding and other busy work onto it. I'll keep my current board as a work station and fill it up wit a RAID array of SSD's. Who needs a work station with any more power than a Q6600 has? For the day to day tasks what you need is a decent amount of processing power, a good amount of good RAM and the about 10 SSD's in RAID 5.

[Donnie27]

I agree. You know that the motherboards will change drastically in the first year if nothing else even of the processors don't (highly doubtful). Remember the cheesy boards we had to deal with when Conroe hit the market? That was only 2 years ago. I figure I'll continue to run my Q6600 into the ground and when it's finally hosed I'll get some 45 nm quad for short money. When that's toast or I think that the Nehalem market is stabilizing I'm going to make a powerhouse with one of them. Then I'm going to treat it as a server; offload all of my video encoding and other busy work onto it. I'll keep my current board as a work station and fill it up wit a RAID array of SSD's. Who needs a work station with any more power than a Q6600 has? For the day to day tasks what you need is a decent amount of processing power, a good amount of good RAM and the about 10 SSD's in RAID 5.

Cheesy? There wasn't anything wrong with i965 and Conroe ran on last revision of i975 as well. Conroe was a new generation but Nehalem will not suffer from the slow but enough support Conroe got. Too much money to be made.

I'm really sick of folks talking about $1000 CPU's when 2.66GHz might cost about $300 or so. Or less than Conroe E6600 or Athlon X2 3800+. Get real folks what you guys want?Now yield must be danged good if 2.66GHz is the slowest they're going to ship Or has some one mentioned this already?

[xVeinx]

Having had a (intel dp965lt) P965 board and E6300 a month or so after release, I can honestly say that the drivers for that board were less than stellar. It took months for them to get things working smoothly. Basic things like getting the computer to shut down properly didn't always work. I'm not entirely complaining, as I enjoyed the problem solving and such, but realistically the board needed work. I'm not going to naysay Intel's ability to get it right, but I think it reasonable to say that the convergence of a new memory design, new system bus, new socket, new chipset, and new core all at once is a large bit. It's going to take time for manufacturers to get the drivers, bioses, etc. correct. My prediction is that we'll see marginal performance increases in memory speed, etc from the system as well as I/O issues until the quirks get worked out. Is the potential for the architecture impressive? Sure. Just don't expect it to be smooth going for the first few months. They don't call it the bleeding edge for nothing...

EDIT: This was seen even more recently with the Intel X38/X48 skulltrail board. Not to pick on Intel boards, as others have had issues as well, but there are still quirks that haven't fully been solved.

[saint-francis]

Don't get me wrong! I got a DFI 975X/G and an E6600 right off the bat and I was in love. I had a %50 OC Orthos stable in about 1/2 hour. But my DFI P35 and my Q6600 beat the bag out of my first C2D system. Obviously the new lineup is going to be stellar. I'm just personally going to wait until everything gets comfortable before I jump on the i7 train.

[RPGWiZaRD]

Nope not buying it.
I can't tell you how many times I've upgraded board, card and CPU, and RAM, in the reign of 775 Socket. As always, incremental changes and optimizations are bound to come as the architecture matures. It is my opinion that now is the time to hop on that high end or performance 775 train and ride it out for about a year or year and a half till the price comes down, the technology matures, and the software catches up to it.

That's my opinion as well, I'd rather stay with a good socket 775 setup for a while until this new technology matures and gets cheaper. Also DDR3 pricing and offerings ain't on the level yet I'd like it to be. I'm sure in 1 year it'll better.

[paulhamm]

Nope not buying it.
I can't tell you how many times I've upgraded board, card and CPU, and RAM, in the reign of 775 Socket. As always, incremental changes and optimizations are bound to come as the architecture matures. It is my opinion that now is the time to hop on that high end or performance 775 train and ride it out for about a year or year and a half till the price comes down, the technology matures, and the software catches up to it.

That's my opinion as well, I'd rather stay with a good socket 775 setup for a while until this new technology matures and gets cheaper. Also DDR3 pricing and offerings ain't on the level yet I'd like it to be. I'm sure in 1 year it'll better.

Still wondering about this also. Though I expect the 775 has peaked or close to it. I would like to get a deal on a nice quad for one of my DT systems. I figure when the core i7 hits the bulk of the 775 procs are going to start hitting fire sale prices.

[bowman]

Again, if none serious overclockers like Tom's Hardware can get 4GHz, worries about it not overclocking is worrying about nothing.

Yeah, but everything seems to indicate this is on the 'XE'.. What worries people (me along with them) is the OC-age on the non-silly ones.

[Epsilon84]

Still wondering about this also. Though I expect the 775 has peaked or close to it. I would like to get a deal on a nice quad for one of my DT systems. I figure when the core i7 hits the bulk of the 775 procs are going to start hitting fire sale prices.

Thats my plan anyway. I'm currently running a C2D, I'm waiting for the Q9650 price to drop after Nehalem launches. Gonna overclock it to around 4GHz (hopefully), should last me a good while.

[Kingcarcas]

Can't wait to see some world records with these chips.

of video encoding and editing, my flight simulators, and folding.

I like your tone

[Booj]

I want to know if they coldbug or not. I saw that article @ Nordichardware saying one was running at -120c which is promising. If it turns out they like the cold.. then it's time to buy a cascade

[@@@@]

Same here plan on waiting for the price drop then decide which one to buy depending on the price drop, Nehalem is a great processor but i usually wait for the shrink derivative of the Architecture from their tick tock strategy, Westmere (formerly Nehalem-C) 32nm

[dinos22]

I want to know if they coldbug or not. I saw that article @ Nordichardware saying one was running at -120c which is promising. If it turns out they like the cold.. then it's time to buy a cascade

put your order in mate
you getting a kayl cascade? :d

[Booj]

put your order in mate
you getting a kayl cascade? :d

ehehe that's what I like to hear

Yeah going for a Kayl unit. Not just yet though, have to spend a little bit on i7 EE, triple channel etc

[Bo_Fox]

Guys, with the IMC, triple channel is not going to bring any benefits over dual channel, IMHO... since IMC should already get rid of the latency issues and memory bandwidth issues. Having to buy 3x DDR3 memory modules is gonna be very expensive for now anyways, and rather impractical. Who needs 6GB nowadays instead of 4GB which is already plenty?

Plus, who needs 8 virtual cores? Please give me a *popular* application that will really benefit from 8 "virtual" cores rather than 4 physical cores? I do not know of a game that would use 8 cores at all.. not even Supreme Commander might benefit from 8 "virtual" cores. Hyperthreading on virtual cores only gives like a maximum of 10% improvement over using just the physical cores after all, right? If I got a Nehalem, I'd just disable HT and use the 4 physical cores instead, since it would actually improve performance on most applications that do not care about using 8 virtual cores rather than 4 physical cores. It would probably be 3 years from now when any applications will actually benefit greatly from 8 virtual cores. Otherwise, why aren't you guys sticking to the 2-year-old Pentium 4 chips with Hyperthreading today when there are finally "numerous" games/apps to take advantage of it? 8 virtual cores.. BLAH!

[XS Janus]

Are we talking about games again...
What's wrong? Be happy you DON'T need to upgrade...

[Nedjo]

Bo Fox, you're absolutely right on both issues - tri-channel mem. ctrl. will only show it's strengths in SiSoft Sandra, and efficiency of HT is academic, according to Anand:



I mean 10% in ideal paralleled situation like rendering is laughable!

[JPQY]

Well..i'am already waiting for many years when they come with cpu's with multi cores..i'am not a gamer but i play chess,do analyses and so on..and have never enough cores! There are chess engines ready for 2048cores,so i think i have to wait many years when i see a computer who has these cores!
But you are right,this is just one example off software and chess use these cores 100%.

Here some test results:

Engine ------------- Depth--- Time- Total nodes - Nodes/s.--Score ----- Hardware
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1)TogaII142JD-8cpu 21/46 03:46 208.317.723 7.345.841 +0,26 Skulltrail 2xQX9775 @4.2Ghz DDR2: 4-5-5-17
2)TogaII141SE-16cpu 21/45 03:30 94.511.341 6.843.413 +0.22 Gainestown 2xNehalem @3.07Ghz DDR3: 9-9-9-24
3)TogaII142JD-16cpu 21/46 03:59 96.988.402 6.521.362 +0.26 Gainestown 2xNehalem @2.93Ghz DDR3: 8-8-8-19
4)TogaII142JD-8cpu 21/52 03:31 174.872.390 6.286.188 +0.25 Skulltrail 2xQX9775 @ 4.0Ghz
5)TogaII142JD-8cpu 21/46 03:54 172.582.215 5.891.624 +0.30 Nehalem @ 2.93Ghz
6)TogaII142JD-8cpu 21/50 03:37 154.531.874 5.278.434 +0.26 Skulltrail Harpertown 2xE5430 @ 3.0Ghz
7)TogaII141SE-4cpu 21/52 05:12 364.182.100 4.576.252 +0,20 Q6600 g0 @ 3.2Ghz (My PC) DDR2: 5-5-5-15
8)TogaII142JD-4cpu 21/52 03:48 260.594.079 4.556.842 +0,23 Q6600 g0 @ 3.2Ghz (My PC) DDR2: 5-5-5-15
9)TogaII142JD-8cpu 21/48 04:19 106.946.778 3.351.022 +0,20 2xOpteron 2347 @1.9Ghz

JP.

[Epsilon84]

Bo Fox, you're absolutely right on both issues - tri-channel mem. ctrl. will only show it's strengths in SiSoft Sandra, and efficiency of HT is academic, according to Anand:



I mean 10% in ideal paralleled situation like rendering is laughable!

So you'd say no to 10 - 30% free performance?

Even without HT Nehalem is already heads and shoulders above any existing CPU in multi-threaded performance, HT is just the icing on the cake.

I bet if AMD somehow incorporated HT and even got a modest 5 - 10% boost you wouldn't find it so 'laughable' or 'academic'. Just a hunch.

[Nosfer@tu]

Nope not buying it.
I can't tell you how many times I've upgraded board, card and CPU, and RAM, in the reign of 775 Socket. As always, incremental changes and optimizations are bound to come as the architecture matures. It is my opinion that now is the time to hop on that high end or performance 775 train and ride it out for about a year or year and a half till the price comes down, the technology matures, and the software catches up to it.

new technoligy isent for people that want the best system for the buck!!!!!!

Cheesy? There wasn't anything wrong with i965 and Conroe ran on last revision of i975 as well. Conroe was a new generation but Nehalem will not suffer from the slow but enough support Conroe got. Too much money to be made.

I'm really sick of folks talking about $1000 CPU's when 2.66GHz might cost about $300 or so. Or less than Conroe E6600 or Athlon X2 3800+. Get real folks what you guys want?Now yield must be danged good if 2.66GHz is the slowest they're going to ship Or has some one mentioned this already?

why are you sick of that Donnie ?
Who cares if the cpu that is listed at 1000 $ only runs 30% faster than the cpu listed at 500 $

THIS IS XTREMESYSTEMS. NOT BUGET SYSTEMS, Not best bang for buck...

I dont understand why everybody gets so agitated.
RELAX, Dont buy if you dont like the price ratio.
BE HAPPY somthing new is comming out so you can save even more on the Q9450. JESUS RELAX EVERYBODY

[jmke]

THIS IS XTREMESYSTEMS. NOT BUGET SYSTEMS, Not best bang for buck...

last time I checked, overclocking was/is still a major part of getting more performance out of your components, if they are expensive or not.
it all started out exactly by most bang for the buck, it's not because the market tells you overclocking is cool and costs much, you have to follow...

[Hornet331]

snip

lol one bloomfield @ 2,93 ghz is in the same range as a duaksocket QX9770 @ 4ghz.

now thats performance.

[Bo_Fox]

So you'd say no to 10 - 30% free performance?

Even without HT Nehalem is already heads and shoulders above any existing CPU in multi-threaded performance, HT is just the icing on the cake.

I bet if AMD somehow incorporated HT and even got a modest 5 - 10% boost you wouldn't find it so 'laughable' or 'academic'. Just a hunch.

Well, your hunch got me wrong... I do not have a benchmarking fetish. If I were all about 3dsMax, I'd be thrilled to have the 10% performance increase thanks to 8 virtual cores.

Well, the reality is that HT actually *decreases* performance on most apps that do not take advantage of multiple cores. That is why it was recommended to turn off HT on many P4 CPU's back then in the hey days. Heck, I'd love to turn it off until there are enough apps taking advantage of 8 cores. Most newer apps only use up to 2 cores, let alone 4 cores. Plus HT is known to bring some compatibility issues with a number of software programs/drivers. Man, I do not want even a bit of a headache from coping with any of those potential issues. If Core i7 does not allow for disabling of HT in the BIOS, I'd be further discouraged from buying it.

[.Logic]

THIS IS XTREMESYSTEMS...

Ah yes... the age old 'THIS IS XTREMESYSTEMS...' mantra. How ignorant of me, I must remember to abandon all intelligence and logic in accordance with the forum name

Seriously though, Bo Fox I can understand where you're coming from however, in order for computer tech to progress forward something has to come first (what good would a multi threaded application be without a multi core processor to run it well). At least you can turn HT off if you are so inclined...

[Epsilon84]

Well, your hunch got me wrong... I do not have a benchmarking fetish. If I were all about 3dsMax, I'd be thrilled to have the 10% performance increase thanks to 8 virtual cores.

My post wasn't directed at you...

Well, the reality is that HT actually *decreases* performance on most apps that do not take advantage of multiple cores.

I don't think so...
http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=1746&p=6

It looks like Intel was able to deliver on their claims, most users should have no problem leaving Hyper-Threading enabled as it won't reduce performance.

This chart pretty much invalidates the remainder of your post regarding HT...

[Macadamia]

So you'd say no to 10 - 30% free performance?

Even without HT Nehalem is already heads and shoulders above any existing CPU in multi-threaded performance, HT is just the icing on the cake.

I bet if AMD somehow incorporated HT and even got a modest 5 - 10% boost you wouldn't find it so 'laughable' or 'academic'. Just a hunch.

You're completely off point.


Nehalem's ESSENCE has been SMT. I was actually really stoked about it- there's apps that aren't too optimized like Maxwell or Vue that could need the extra power that I'd appreciate. This is laughable for something hyped to hell and back. Where's the 50%+ that was speculated due to "SMT using the wider architecture better"? It hardly even matters at this point!

It's now truth: Dunnington is going to roll over, squish and ra*e Bloomfield, a "markedly superior" architecture in the apps that matter.