Nehalem-EP......BLOOMFIELD

[virtualrain]

A few questions.

1. When should we see the first round of Bloomsfield chips?
2. How much will they cost?
3. What type of DD3 memory is a safe bet to buy now?

1. The only official date we have is Q4. Having said that, the CPU's are rumored to be good to go. We are now only waiting on motherboard validation and tuning. Tom's has a Foxconn X58 board on hand and they say the boards are half-way through validation. Given that the first boards appeared at Computex, one might conclude that Nehalem systems could be ready in a couple of months. Conroe did make an early appearance so perhaps Nehalem will as well.

2. The rumored costs are $316 (2.66GHz) to $999 (3.2GHz).

3. Unless you intend to overclock the max stock DDR3 RAM speeds supported will be DDR3-1333 for the 3.2GHz part and DDR3-1066 for the 2.66 and 2.93 GHz parts. However, overclocking will likely allow any speed up to the max supported by your memory. Keep in mind that Bloomfields IMC and tri-channel capability means there will be a lot less need for super high speeds (after all, DDR3-1333 in tri-channel mode has a peak theoretical bandwidth of 32GB/s which is more than C2D L2 cache!). I would focus on a kit that has lower latencies at 1333 speeds than a kit that blows the doors off at 2000MHz. More info on RAM potential with Nehalem here.

Cheers,
-Chris.