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.

New Intel Processors!!!

As you may have read, Intel released a new set of CPUs this week. We'll be updating our site tomorrow to offer the new chips, but I wanted to take the opportunity to chat about what's new:

The old i7 chips were known as Bloomfield, and fit into socket 1366 motherboards, which ran on the Intel X58 chipset. The new CPUs "Lynnfield" are split into two options - the single "i5" 750, and two "i7" options, the 860 & the 870. The primary differences between the i5 and i7 chips (aside from the fact that the i5 is slightly slower than the slowest i7) is that the i5 does not support hyperthreading. (Hyperthreading makes a quad core CPU act as if it has 8 cores.) These new chips fit into socket 1156 motherboards, which use Intel's new P55 chipset. Bear in mind that P55 motherboards are generally less expensive than X58 boards, so going with Lynnfield chips reduces the cost of the PC a bit. So here is the entire Intel lineup as of today:

i5-750 2.66GHz $210 P55/1156
i7-920 2.66GHz $220 X58/1366

i7-860 2.80GHz $300 P55/1156

i7-950 3.06GHz $570 X58/1366
i7-870 2.93GHz $580 P55/1156

i7-975 3.33GHz $999 X58/1366

The memory controller on the new CPUs is a little bit faster than the old ones. While it's true that the new chips only support dual-channel memory (vs. triple-channel on the 1366 chips) that won't affect gaming performance until we start seeing games that stress three cores or more simultaneously - and that's still years away.

That means the new Lynnfield/P55 CPUs will give you more bang for your gaming dollar right now. It also means that you're opting out of a simple chip swap to go 6-core when those chips come out next year - P55-based machines will be limited to quad core. Personally, I don't see that as an issue, since by the time games can really use more than four cores, you'll be buying a new PC anyway, but if you want to be able upgrade to a 6-core chip next year, go for an X58-based PC.

In addition, if you're going for a high-end SLI or Crossfire rig, you'll want to stick with the X58 chipset, as that's one rare case where the X58's faster PCI bus will make a difference. I'm talking about a pair of GTX 285's, GTX 295's, or ATI 4870's 4890's, or 4870X2's. (Triple-GPUs of any kind would qualify too.)

Here's a reality check since the majority of our customers are gamers - none of the CPU options you pick are going to have anywhere near as great of an effect on your gaming performance as your video card choices. The only way to get CPU-bound on today's games is to throw $400 or more worth of video cards at a 19" or smaller monitor, at which point you should call us so we can point your money in a better direction.

So our advice: Go for the new P55/1156 chips unless:
A. You want to be able to drop in a six-core next year, or
B. You want to do a high-end SLI/Crossfire rig, or
C. You want the fastest PC possible (which is still the i7-975)

Happy hunting!