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Processor Dillemna
I took advantage of the Microcenter sale and bought for $280 a 2600K.
There are vast differences between a 2500K and 2600K like 8 threads vs 4 threads. Cache Sizes, etc...Its easier to multithread a game than it is to multicore a game. Socket 1155 boards are scarce thanks to the recall.
Microcenter sold out of the motherboards that I wanted, so of course I have to wait on motherboards. I was looking forward to P8P67 Pro boards. They support SLI and have what I need and overclock well....But are there are any motherboard out there anyone recommends?
I am looking for putting in minimum 16GB RAM as I will begin Ramdisking Clusters (which requires a very strong core system) and of course I will go SLI.
Comments
For an ordinary gaming system, this will work:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813130574
It does support SLI, albeit with both slots at x8 bandwidth. I count seven power phases, which should be enough for a decent overclock. If you don't like MSI, or want something higher end, then you'll basically have to wait for more motherboards to return.
Last Generation Seven Power Phases was enough. This generation the equation changes.
In the EFI Bios one can set the processor power draw of the sandy bridge processor (TDP) to 200w. Its common to do this for the overclock to 4.8ghz, which does Rock Solid Performance under a decent aftermarket Air Cooler. Combine this with going SLI on a board and more is needed to cut stress down.
This is why Mid to High End boards for Sandy Bridge processors (the K series processors specifically) are being released to having 8 - 12 phases of power.
Not to mention the only SSDs I would install are a SATA III or my personal favorite from tests....Direct Connection to PCI-Express Slots. One reason I pick out the PCI-Express SSDs is because it simplifies things to say "my primary SSD is on the PCI Express Bus while secondary HDDs and SSDs are in the bays themselves. This makes configuration a lot easier keeping as much possible on the PCI EXPRESS and becomes a lot easier to transfer a system from board to board, case to case too.
The only thing I do not like to an Asus P8P67 is that PCI-Express Slot x16 Slot #3 SHARES bandwith with everything in all other slots except the other two PCI-Express slots, so you got to put just one Card (like an SSD) and NOTHING ELSE In the other slots...Yeah, I just woke up and its 1999 again!
It depends on how far you want to overclock it. If you want to push it to 3.8 GHz at the stock voltage and call that good enough, 7 power phases is enough. If you're going to bump the voltage and try for 5 GHz, then yeah, you'd want something higher end.
If you want two video cards in SLI, and also a PCI Express SSD, then you'll need a lot of PCI Express bandwidth. You'll also need appropriate spacing of the slots, and that can be hard to come by. Asus' Maximus IV Extreme or Gigabyte's GA-P67A-UD7 have the appropriate PCI-Express bandwidth for that, but not the slots appropriately spaced.
It's a lot easier to get the appropriate bandwidth if it's built in the chipset, as AMD's 990FX (or whatever the successor to 890FX) will have, and then you'll have more choices--unless Nvidia refuses to license SLI on AMD chipsets. With Nvidia no longer making new chipsets, they may have to allow SLI on AMD chipsets or risk SLI becoming irrelevant. But there's no guarantee that they'll do that. The high end Sandy Bridge chipsets aren't coming until late this year, so you probably don't want to wait for that.
The other option would be to just run the video cards at x8 bandwidth, and accept there's a performance hit for that in some games. It's too hard to dig through motherboards when they're off the market, so I'm not going to try. It's also a lot easier to get the appropriate expansion slot spacing if all you need is two PCI Express x16 slots 3-4 positions apart, rather than three such slots to allow for the PCI Express SSD.
You realize that the "phases" in a motherboard voltage regulator are just an advertising gimmick? You could have a motherboard with 100 phases, and it won't necessarily perform any better than one with 3, or 7, or even 24. All the motherboard voltage regulator does is cut the 12V Rail down to the BIOS-requested voltage for the CPU and RAM. Nothing else. Your video cards, and PCI power, do not come from the motherboard voltage regulator, they come directly from the 12V, 5v and 3.3V rails on your power supply. The motherboard voltage regulator is just a glorified DC-DC converter, a classic circuit most EE students will learn in their first year. Some are more efficient than others, but don't let the marketing flair fool you, you can't tell anything just from the number they print on the box, you have to look at stress tests and see how it really performs before you can tell anything.
And slightly off topic, weren't you just saying, in another post, that you weren't convinced SSD's were worth the money, because RAMDisks were where it was at?
There's a limit to how much current one single power phase can safely convert the voltage on, though. That's why motherboards invariably have several of them operating in parallel. Having more of them means you can feed more power to the processor while still doing the proper voltage conversions.
A video card has its own separate electrical hardware to convert voltages for the GPU, so motherboard power phases aren't relevant there. But they do limit processor overclocking if there aren't enough of them. Or if there were too few, you couldn't safely run a processor at the stock speeds even. This is why even low end motherboards will have three or four. I think there are two different voltages that they have to convert to, so two would be the minimum if there were limitations on how much power a single phase can handle.
Of course, the question of how much power each can deliver is also a tricky question, as different types can deliver different amounts of power.
Thanks Quizzical.
Although computer performance when it comes to multipliers makes the performance a parabola (if the multiplier is too high, a point is reached where the processor spends more time clocking and attempting to access than executing...Too low and you just don't maximize performance), performance in video games and applications tends to be written as a Rational Function given a processor.
There is a point where the gain becomes far too little in overclocking when testing against almost any program that overclocking pass a certain point is a waste of everything.
To the other poster. My apologies for not remembering your name..I mean no insult or disrespect.
Computer Technology is full of Marketting gimmicks. I know the majority of them. Even I have a friend who keeps my head from falling below my ass. We spend most of our time deciphering these marketting gimmicks. If there is one thing I learned from going through an entire computer science major and then learning some electrical and mechanical engineering was how to expose these gimmicks and truly see how things are...Doesn't mean I have all the time in the world to find them all.
Reminds me of the Pokemon Phrase "Gotta Catch 'em all"
I'm looking at ripjaw memory....(basically 4x4GB at 2133mhz) for around 400 is nice...though I found a place that sells it for 350.