Maximum PC

Has Intel announced the release date for LGA 2011 Ivy Bridge chips? I want to move to LGA 2011 for my new MB and want Ivy Bridge. So I'm in a holding pattern for now. but I'm positive i want LGA2011 for the extra memory and PCI Express lanes.

Why? You can find high-end LGA1155 motherboards that support 3-Way SLI or CrossFire X. And you're never going to need more than 8GB of memory. If this is for games, then you'll never need more than 8GB, which you can just stick two 4GBx2. And if it's for memory bandwidth, it doesn't really matter in games. The higher end sockets are for "enthusiasts" or people who actually need that computing power. Which games can't do.

But if you're doing a lot of video encoding or folding, then sure. I'll bite.

Because with the 1155 board you don't get full X16 speed when you 3 way SLI also i want to ram drive my games for faster load times between areas. there are huge advantages to LGA 2011 over 1155 not only with the CPU.

I was actually considering going with AMD since i can get a board for them that will take 256 GB of ram talk about a fast drive. Would blow an SSD out of the water. but their chips are inferior to Intel in raw processing power.

It's been shown graphics cards don't need 16 lanes to operate at high performance. Yes it's showing a card two generations behind and an interface now a generation behind, but considering at GTX 480 didn't falter between x4, x8 and x16, I don't see how a GTX 680 could falter between x4, x8, and x16 on a PCIe 3.0 slot.

Also RAM drives are hit and miss in games, and according to this post, doesn't offer that much improvement over a WD Green drive used as a comparison. And Windows 7 is smart enough to realize if you're running a program or have been running it frequently, it will cache it in RAM. You're better off with a high performance SSD, because then you won't have to deal with having to load your game onto it every time you power on the machine.

The bit above about RAM drives not improving speed much would suggest that we've actually hit a bottleneck somewhere though...

these posts seem to suggest otherwise to the performance data in the post you made.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAdRsQJBEBE&feature=player_embedded
http://www.mydigitallife.info/free-ramdisk-for-windows-vista-xp-2000-and-2003-server/
http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?p=3780131
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XQaxIw5y40

Two of these are benchmarks, which are not a reflection of real performance. One of these is a single case, which requires you to run a script every time you boot up and I couldn't find a clear post on "this is my time before the mod, this my time after the mod". One of these is just a tutorial on how to do it.

But you know, if money is not an object, then by all means, go for it. But if you're on a budget, there are things where money is better spent for performance.

I don't really anticipate a huge price difference between the LGA 2011 ivy bridge and the 1155 ivy bridge chips.

And no one has yet to answer my initial question, so i guess the information hasn't been released.

To my knowledge it was 3rd to 4th quarter (mainly november/december) for those releases. Boards and CPU will probably be the same price as the current gen after seeing how they released this current generation of 1155's within the same price. In your case though the whole cost/performance ratio will be off. You can run multiple SSDs in raid array that will probably perform just as fast (or faster for much cheaper then 256GB of ram......or even cheaper then 64 gb of ram(considering Intel sticks with the 64gb limit.

And as for PCI lanes......are you really going to run tri sli? Do you really have 2000+ US dollars for that when even just a single 680 (or even the newer 690's) have more then enough power to play current gen and future gen for the next 4-5 years at top specs. The goal is to not spend top dollar right away and be stuck with a $8,000 machine that will be old in 2 years but to get a $1000 machine that you can replace the CPU in a 2 to 3 years and then the video cards and newer and better things come out. Once you get that tri sli good luck on raising another 2000+ for another tri sli and then realizing your CPU is now the bottleneck for being 4 years old and you have to replace that and then the mobo.

Basically we are trying to tell you to not waste the money if you don't need to.

It was a $300 price difference for the unlocked chips... and ram drives aren't really worth it, especially when using a ramdisk that you can't write programs to because they would be removed whenever you restart your PC.

To bolster this, let's put it this way:

You can spend up to about $270 for 3 Crucial M4 64GB SSDs in RAID 0, which its theoretical read performance would probably match DDR3-1600. And you won't have the problem of having to run RAMDisk or anything else because the data is retained.

Or you can spend $420 at the minimum for 64GB of GSKLL Ripjaws Z Series, and go through all the hassle of having to refresh your RAM drive every time you boot.

Either way, the verdict of using a RAM drive is: if you were expecting "holy shit this is fast!" load times compared to say an SSD, you're going to be sorely disappointed.