Quote Originally Posted by DarthShader View Post
But there's no "more" cores in the chips this topic is about.


There's no six memory channels there, they are not working together on memory reads. And there is additional latency when communicating between the dies. While SB cores have a fast ring bus at their disposal.

Any SR-2 and SB owner willing to do gaming tests with two X5698 ?
No, with three memory channels per processor and two processors with two QPI links and NUMA you really have six memory channels. The SB cores might have effective memory handling, but they can't reach the > 30 GB/s memory bandwidth of the Xeons.

Anyway, the GPU's are far more important for gaming performance than the CPU's. Are there any decent SB boards out there where you can pop in 3-4 x16 PCIe cards? Just asking...