Maximum PC

Alright... Im a bit confused as to which status each socket has; it's purpose, i suppose you could say? Alright, if im interpreting them correctly; 1155 is the current P55, and 2011 is the powerhouse 1366 was made to be (and hell...still is, if you ask me).

If im understanding the role each platform is playing, one thing still confuses me. The compatibility. Just as P55 had compatibility with the i7 while the X58 was out.

Im probably just going to confuse myself and others if i continue going on... LOL

I will just ask the question. How do the CPUs that are compatible/usable on these two platforms differ? The current Sandy Bridge i7s will be compatible with the 22nm die Ivy Bridge platforms...Soooo...? What does that mean from a hardware perspective, and what does it mean for the CPUs, basically, is what im asking.

PHEW!

Yes, Intel likes to confuse people with so many socket changes per generation. Also I believe P55 chipset uses the older 1156, not 1155 socket.

First gen i7's, there was 1156 and 1366. The 1156 was for lower end i5 and i7's while the 1366 was meant for more powerful i7's. The 2nd gen Sandy bridge cpus introduce the 1155 socket replaced most of the i3/i5/i7 lines, even while the 1366 was still being supported with hexacore cpu's with both i7's and xeons.

Currently, there is the 1155 and 2011 sockets. The biggest difference between those two is that with 2011, most of those pins are slated for the 40 pcie lanes instead of the 16 on the sandy/ivy bridges; plus as for right now, you can only get hexacore cpu's on the 2011. Oh and you get quad channel ram on 2011 instead of dual channel.

As for chipsets, the z77 will be slated with Ivy Bridge, but Intel has said that the z68 will work with it as well. It should add some new features, but I honestly haven't looked at it since they aren't released yet and most of the expected features are already included with the z68.

It's not confusing at all and I don't see the issue. Will it fit? It's a yes or no answer. Don't mux socket with chipset and you're good.

Can I run a s1156 CPU in a s2011 board. NO! Can I run an AM2 in a s1156? NO! Can I run AM3+ in FM3? NO!

Damn, I love plug and play...but this is getting stupid. 1155 is not p55 bound. H61, 64, 67...those "allow" that socket. Intel still to this day makes it less confusing by changing sockets when things change.

Oh, ok. Thanks for clearing that up. Last gen made perfect sense to me. Ever since P55 was introduced a while back, it's all been confusing to me.


Now, as for X79... Im planning on making my beast gaming rig using the Asus Rampage IV Extreme. That thing is absolutely dirty... But is it really worth it?

I just hope they offer more CPU options in the future for it. The most ridiculous quad cores out now have ridiculous amounts of power, that, tbh you're not going to be able to fully take advantage of. That's going to be my strategy. Get a quad core, wait for the Hexacores to drop in price, because you're basically buying a future-proof CPU in terms of performance. I don't see how, for example; if you are a gamer, Game devs will take advantage of that tremendous amount of power available from a 3960X...

I mean, SERIOUSLY? Going extremely deep with optimizations for a six cores in terms of coding, the only dev that comes to mind is id Software. (Going a little off topic here, but it just puzzles me.)

I seriously believe that once the 3960 drops in price even 40-60%, there will be plenty of Jam left.

Look at the X58 platform, still. There's lots of power left in those systems if you ask me. it's no news that the computer industry moves extremely quickly, and it's gaming that drives the industry, but good God... What do you need a 3960X for, to run the Matrix?

Processors don't, if ever, drop in price. And if they do, it usually drops gradually to a maximum of about 20%. It's basically a game of cat and mouse. If say AMD comes out with a processor that performs as well as Intel's $200 part for $180, Intel will likely drop that part to $180. And both will stay. Until Intel comes out with a part that performs as good for $170, then maybe AMD will drop the price. Processor's real "price drop" is just a replacement model. The only time a processor drops beyond 20% is if it's so old, that the store is just trying to get rid of it.

And if you need proof that processors don't drop in price, the 990X still goes for near it's MSRP (if it ever dropped in price) on Newegg ( http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6819115079 ) and isn't this thing like old in computer land?

Yeah, the extreme edition Intel chips NEVER drop in price... And I mean never. Worst price/performance ratio. They are like buying new merc's, the second you drive it off the lot, you loose half it's value. My friend went from the 980x to the 3960x and could only sell his 1366 board with the add-on LC chipset block along with the 980x for only $600 on ebay... just so he could upgrade to the latest hexacore chipset that's more suited for his quad 480 setup. Although, he did upgrade right after to quad 580's... Dude has sick money to just burn.

Most other Intel or amd chips rarely drop in price significantly. You might be lucky to get 20% off, but never expect 40-60% off unless you consider the used market or steal a truck full of pc parts, MW3 style.

Depends... do you have the 5-10k+ to drop on a system to take advantage of such a chassis? Going for absolute speed with no regard to logic or price? Its only worth it if you have more money than brains and looking to pair a good 3 or 4 way SLI with extreme OC's running on liquid, otherwise its an utter complete waste of money. That you could have been happier with a cheaper build.

Once you hit a certain level of cpu performance, its moot to get anything faster for gaming for a simple single, dual or even triple SLI/xfire setup. Most modern games are much more GPU intensive than CPU, up to the point of where you really need the cpu speed for triple or quad SLI/xfire or the extra dedicated bandwidth lanes for the gpu's with the 2011 platform.

Again, its for people who have more money than brains, who need 40 pcie 3.0 lanes for their gpu's or just need a very fast 1P workstation cpu. At stock speeds, the 3960x is around 30% faster than the i7 2600k in most content creation apps, but they can crank up to 5ghz a lot easier for extra horse power. My friend has his stable at 5.2ghz and still runs fairly cool.

So you're saying that pretty much in either situation, regardless of what you need are doing with it... A Rampage 4 Extreme will be useless. Also, 5-10K...TBH, is a waste of money regardless. You'd have to be mental to spend that on a computer. I could just never agree with that. I don't see why you'd need to spend that much money for that board, though. Was thinking around the 2-3000 mark. I just want to get it mainly because its a very high quality board. Built like a tank, and is future-proof. Then again, any new performance playform is, what with USB 3.0 and all these SATA 6 goodies. Hahah...But i remember my greediness kicking in once the EVGA 4-way SLI board came out... You know, the X58 board that at the time only 9 chassis could fit it? AHAHAHA... Till i realized it was a complete waste of money, and is completely useless, given the fact that the board loses so much bandwidth with that 4-way SLI (assuming cards that produce a serious amount of jam are installed in all four slots) it will only be worth while if you're after some serious benchmarking sessions...

Anyhow. Thanks for clearing this up for me, folks.


Also, just for the hell of it, could you post some examples of nice, high performance boards?

First, Boss had the bad judgement to give me a bonus decided to blow it on a crazy-fast new rig.

I sold my Z68/i7-2600K rig to build a X79/i7-3820 rig.

My ASUS P8Z68-V/GEN3 board with i7-2600K CPU was significantly faster!
- Win7 "Experience Index": Z68/i7-2600K = 7.8; X79/i7-3820 = 7.7
- Auslogics Benchtown score: Z68/i7-2600K > 2000; X79/i7-3820 = 1765

Side note: a single PCIe2.0 GTX 560Ti is faster than 2 PCIe3.0 HD7770s w/ Crossfire

I recommend you get the BEST Z68 mo'board your budget will allow; plug in an i7-2600K; and spend the rest on a hi-end NVidia GPU. My money says LGA2011 is a bad decision.

1. That was a terrible choice as an upgrade... I mean I would have never consider going from an unlocked i7 to a semi-locked i7... Although you can still overclock the 3820 to 4.7Ghz, but it requires a bit more fancy footplay and work compared to the unlocked chips. The only reason why you'd want to do that for gaming is if you really needed the 40 pcie lanes for graphics...

2. LOL... Win7 "experience index" and Auslogics Benchtown are utterly useless numbers. You might as well say I have the fastest car on the road... at 3am...

3. The entry level 7k series card are definitely a miss; sadden's me that their 7900 and 7800 series hit a really good price/performance value and they just bombed on this; even their 6800/6700 series cards run faster for the same price. And why made a note of this; if one is seriously shelling out cash for a triple/quad board, one would not use low quality gpu's that can't even be setup in a triple or quad setup.

4. I would NOT recommend you to buy the "best" z68 money/budget could buy. You can be a smart shopper and only buy what you need; not dump $350 on a board that you will never use when a $130 will work just fine. Even for a decent budgeted $2500 rig. Also, for gaming, you don't need an i7... You can run games just as fast on an i5 without HT since games barely use 2 or 4 threads. Even with my i7, my cpu only uses about 40% load in BF3. As for GPU's, it depends on the price/performance and what you want to accomplish. A two card mid range setup usually beats a single card solution, but it also limits your upgrade path and may increase your power consumption; requiring a beefy psu.

*Tap tap tap, this thing on?*

Um, no...it's March. Don't buy ANYTHING. You don't have to like advice, but it's for sure golden. I do like to brag when looking back at my predictions and all that. I'm not the most pleasing, never been my point to be, but will tell you exactly what is happening from experience in all fields talked about and as a user. I'm not a good reviewer because I've been an engineer at any party discussed...and if that's not non-biased, I don't know what is. I know the guts, still see it, and still pay money as a user.

CPU's:
Sandy Bridge-E is a minor step up from any other Sandy prior. Tick-Tock, anyone? You get JACK from any s2011 CPU vs an i7 s1155 unit overall. Unless you're into masochism; SB-E is a bust. Those that have it have the latest and greatest now, but they spent their wad ignorantly instead of THE Ivy Bridge build they just couldn't wait for that's due in April.

Chipsets:
Chips are a foundation. No chip to date really does anything amazing the "old" H67 does when H61 is more than likely the best for builders. H67 allowed two S/ATAIII channels for SSD users and is a huge perk while good board makers allowed onboard USB3.0 ports (Both have them in the rear I/O). Z68 allowed users to downgrade there SSD's as humble cache drives instead of actually building a mean machine. They're all s1155 and accept some killer CPU's. Seriously, I'm not bragging here, but I have an H67 iTX that can pound an i7 x58 tower in the dirt outside of Graphics....and even then, I think I can top that thing with a mATX H67.

In April they're all pulling the sheet off everything, so in May you could have a shoe box sporting some very high end shit that'll topple all past boxes of any size. $2,500 can get you a killer machine and it'll fit in a sock drawer. If you buy now, you're buying last year's tech basically. IB will be a very nice upgrade in a capable s1155 motherboard and a $500 AMD card that's currently topping the charts will be a silly wishlist item that's quickly deleted. (AMD's moving out. Slowly, but surely. They're obsolete and don't have the foundation to get better than competition...thus, prices won't drop by competitors.)

SB-E isn't even the same design as SB... its an 8-core processor with two cores disabled, but you still get 6 for the 3930k and 3960k. It's not a tick or a tock, just a new product line; stemmed away from the older i7 extremes. While a bit of the architectural is similar to SB, they did make it better in some areas with more cache and increased the pcie dedicated lanes; no small task mind you.

If you need a fast 1P 6 core system, it will tear through multi-threaded apps better than 1155 SB or even the new IB. They just can't make up for the extra two cores (4 threads) yet. For gaming, it doesn't matter... until you need all the CPU power you can get for your SLI/xfire setup, because only then does the CPU become the real bottle neck, not the GPU's.

If you plan on using a 4 card setup, then the extra lanes is pretty helpful making sure you aren't bogging down your $500+ cards.



And honestly, SB is still fast enough for most people, even doing current SLI/xfire builds that barely has any games that can really use all that power... If a person can't wait for one more month for IB. It won't really make your games run any faster.

$2500 is a decent budget? The 2500-3000 range is exactly what im going for. I can't even imagine how much unnecessary BS is needed to rack up something like 5K or more for a PC... If you think deep enough... Even that is pointless. Just as the aformentioned was... CPU bottlenecking is just one thing... Shouldn't exist one the IVs come out. Assuming you've got the right setup . And then again...4 550s would do the trick...Regardless (let's just say CPU bottlenecks were out of the equation completely) ...Who needs that graphics performance?

Furthermore... In relation to that... You would seriously have to go and dig deep into a game's .ini files and make optimizations YOURSELF to take advantage of your rig... Nevermind the fact that you've got it up and running, and built right.

Sort of strange that it's always gaming we're all coming back to, but then again? What drives the industry? What is most demanding that you and i can run at home?

I say Intel give us The Matrix for home use... An MSRP of $299.99 sounds right. Maybe a bit extra for the guy who comes in to do the optimizations for you.





EDIT: ...Call me crazy, but... I've ALWAYS wondered...Im hoping SOMEONE has tried something like this: What if, say...You did a Quad SLI/Xfire setup with some of the most powerful LAST gen GPUs? Given these new CPUs and their higher bandwidth limitations, i would LOVE to see someone try 4 GTX 280s. Or the ATI equivalent to that. Nvidias GPUs are always easier to remember for me... Ahhh...Feels like such a long time ago.

I agree, even a 1500 gaming rig will get you a lot of power in today's game, even for 2560x1600 resolutions. But again, there are a lot of people who will "waste" 5k+ on a gaming system because it has now become more of a lifestyle, rather than a hobby; with a lifestyle, people are willing to spend more money. And again, its not only towards the home user/gamer market either. People can and will build crazy nvidia gpu/2P setups for high end workstations, then you got the whole folding community who build 4P systems with 4 way SLI setups just to crunch some numbers.


Umm.. even the $1,000 3960k cpu will hit cpu bottlenecking in 4 way 580 setups... So I doubt Ivy Bridge will remedy this if you plan on running 4 way SLI with high end gpu's. You just run into the problem of nvidia's scaling issues.


You can't run 4x 550's... You can only do a two card setup with those cheap cards.


If you plan on running 3x 2560x1600 displays, then I could see the need for 3 or 4 way SLI using the latest gpu's. I have a friend who uses 3 1080p projectors for his man cave, but then again, the dude has 3 lambo's and 2 ferrari's.

Can't do 4 550s? Oh...That's weird...Why not? I just chose those entry level 500 cards because i figured they are less demanding for the CPU. I just stopped caring about hardware for the last year or two...

Also, 3 1600 displays? ...That's...Wow...Ridiculous... And going back to a waste of money. Why is it that everything that gets mentioned in this thread always ends up being in that same category...


And to you top it off with Ferraris and Lambos...Ahahaha... Perfect.


Seems like 4 way SLI is always pointless, from what i've heard over the last 3 years or so... Damn benchmarkers...

You need higher end cards like the 570 or the 580 to even do triple or quad SLI configs. You need two sli bridge on the cards to connect more than two. Same goes with AMD's crossfire setups, but they allow more mid range cards to do triple card support. It's not like they couldn't add triple or quad support for low end, budget cards, they don't do it because it would kill the market for their higher end markets; that's why they limit it. If you could put 4x 6870's together, it would kill the triple/quad SLI/xfire market. I mean you are talking about $130-150 cards.


Its not pointless, there is a point, its just wasteful. I mean the only friends I know who run quad sli setups make bank and/or have stupid amount of spending money.

If it's useful, then how is it wasteful?

Also... Back to the mobos... Im still content on getting an either an EVGA Classified X79, or the Rampage 4 Extreme.

Plus, the monitor im going for is a Dell U2711. I need to make a lot of jam to run games on that monitor...

I could drive to work in a Hummer, but why would I when a Prius does the job and saves me money?

By the way I don't have either or am I under some grand delusion. Just doing this to make a point.