P55 vs. X58 (or Ion vs. Fury (or what is Intel's problem?!))
OK,
So Intel came up with a brilliant marketing strategy - let's supplement our i7 line of CPUs with some more i7's, but those new i7's will use a brand new motherboard and CPU socket. Oh and let's introduce the i5 too, but lump it in with those new i7's, which by the way will use faster memory, but drop to dual-channel instead of triple-channel. The new i5/i7's will have a similar price/performance ratio to the old ones, and the fastest of the old ones will still be faster than any of the new ones.
HUH?!
Part of our job here is to chew through all of the particulars for you so we can offer you nice clear choices, and apparently that really wrankles Intel's heinie, 'cause they're making it a lot more difficult than it needs to be. Here's a simple chart that we hope will help clear up this PR fiasco. We're going to show you just the cost of the CPUs paired with a comparable motherboard, so you can see how the price/performance of these two families shakes out. To clarify, the CPUs listed on the left (which we offer in our Ion model), require a P55 motherboard, whereas the CPUs on the right (which we offer in our Fury) require an X58 motherboard.
To illustrate, $320 gets you an i5 750 and an entry-level P55 motherboard, whereas $1,400 will buy the top-drawer i7 975 plus a high-end X58 motherboard.
BTW, don't forget that the i5 does not have hyperthreading (HT lets a quad-core CPU act like an 8-core CPU.) All the others do. Net effect on gaming = nil (for now).
Since Uberclok went online a couple years ago, our models were separated by CPU type. Now the most logical method is to separate by motherboard type, since that's how the i5/i7 family is split. The prices listed above show the combined total of CPU and motherboard (in each case, we paired the level of CPU with the same level of motherboard.) The trouble here is that you can't always choose a model based solely on budget at the moment. The i5 is clearly the choice for the budget-minded, and the i7 975 is the only choice for top-performance. Things get muddy in the middle though. The i7 860 only offers a .14GHz speed increase over the i7 950, and there's very little difference between the 870 and the 950. There are some great architectural improvements with the P55 chipset, and you can read about them at arstechnica, AnandTech, and Techreport, but from a gaming perspective, they aren't going to make a noticeable difference in framerates. Consequently, take a look at the footnotes we put in that chart, and let them influence your decision.
And as always, feel free to email us at info@uberclok.com or call us at (877) 211-4235 with any questions.
So Intel came up with a brilliant marketing strategy - let's supplement our i7 line of CPUs with some more i7's, but those new i7's will use a brand new motherboard and CPU socket. Oh and let's introduce the i5 too, but lump it in with those new i7's, which by the way will use faster memory, but drop to dual-channel instead of triple-channel. The new i5/i7's will have a similar price/performance ratio to the old ones, and the fastest of the old ones will still be faster than any of the new ones.
HUH?!
Part of our job here is to chew through all of the particulars for you so we can offer you nice clear choices, and apparently that really wrankles Intel's heinie, 'cause they're making it a lot more difficult than it needs to be. Here's a simple chart that we hope will help clear up this PR fiasco. We're going to show you just the cost of the CPUs paired with a comparable motherboard, so you can see how the price/performance of these two families shakes out. To clarify, the CPUs listed on the left (which we offer in our Ion model), require a P55 motherboard, whereas the CPUs on the right (which we offer in our Fury) require an X58 motherboard.
To illustrate, $320 gets you an i5 750 and an entry-level P55 motherboard, whereas $1,400 will buy the top-drawer i7 975 plus a high-end X58 motherboard.
BTW, don't forget that the i5 does not have hyperthreading (HT lets a quad-core CPU act like an 8-core CPU.) All the others do. Net effect on gaming = nil (for now).
Since Uberclok went online a couple years ago, our models were separated by CPU type. Now the most logical method is to separate by motherboard type, since that's how the i5/i7 family is split. The prices listed above show the combined total of CPU and motherboard (in each case, we paired the level of CPU with the same level of motherboard.) The trouble here is that you can't always choose a model based solely on budget at the moment. The i5 is clearly the choice for the budget-minded, and the i7 975 is the only choice for top-performance. Things get muddy in the middle though. The i7 860 only offers a .14GHz speed increase over the i7 950, and there's very little difference between the 870 and the 950. There are some great architectural improvements with the P55 chipset, and you can read about them at arstechnica, AnandTech, and Techreport, but from a gaming perspective, they aren't going to make a noticeable difference in framerates. Consequently, take a look at the footnotes we put in that chart, and let them influence your decision.
And as always, feel free to email us at info@uberclok.com or call us at (877) 211-4235 with any questions.
posted by Thomas Glen at
7:23 PM
2 Comments:
This is a great breakdown. Somteimes you have to wonder if Intel is intentionally trying to confuse the masses.
So my question of the moment is should I go with an I7 860 or and I7 920 for if I want to stay int he $500 bucks or lower range for the gaming rig I'm buidling? The rig will likely have 2 graphics cards.
That's the tough call, allright. Performance will be very similar - I guess I'd go with the 860 since there's a bit more expansion opportunities for the memory & CPU...
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