P35, 965 or 975 board?

[SanDiegoPC]

I am jsut about sold on a Q-6700 but may settle for an E-68xx C2Duo instead. Have not made up my mind yet ...

But the MB question is huge. I see that the Intel 975 chipset is faster but the 965 is better in some respects. Then the P935 seems to be the one pulling up the rear.

I want an Asus board. My OC needs are minor; won't be overclocking to any extremes at all but I will be overclocking some.

What's the best Asus board (bang for the buck?) and is a Quad going to OC as well as a Core2Duo?

 

[n7]

:Q

975X & P965 would be very poor choices at this point.

P35 is the way to go.

Asus P5K or P5K-E would be your "bang for buck" OCing options from Asus.

 

[jjmIII]

Agreed, P35.

 

[SanDiegoPC]

Thanks Guys!

Now for the processor Q: Core2Duo or Quad? I can buy a Q6700 locally for $279 and a 3.oG E6850 for 269.

The E6750 (2.66) is just $195 thanks to the Southern CA market.

 

[XBoxLPU]

Quad hands down

 

[Idontcare]

Originally posted by: SanDiegoPC
Thanks Guys!

Now for the processor Q: Core2Duo or Quad? I can buy a Q6700 locally for $279 and a 3.oG E6850 for 269.

The E6750 (2.66) is just $195 thanks to the Southern CA market.

The price concerns me...you get what you pay for and $279 for a Q6700 just seems suspiciously too low.

Are you sure that isn't a Q6600? Or is someone trying to pawn a used/beat-up/burned-out Q6700 on ya? Buyer beware if you found a Q6700 for $279 is my advice.

 

[SanDiegoPC]

Originally posted by: XBoxLPU
Quad hands down

Thanks! Thats' what I needed.

 

[SanDiegoPC]

Originally posted by: Idontcare

Originally posted by: SanDiegoPC
Thanks Guys!

Now for the processor Q: Core2Duo or Quad? I can buy a Q6700 locally for $279 and a 3.oG E6850 for 269.

The E6750 (2.66) is just $195 thanks to the Southern CA market.

The price concerns me...you get what you pay for and $279 for a Q6700 just seems suspiciously too low.

Are you sure that isn't a Q6600? Or is someone trying to pawn a used/beat-up/burned-out Q6700 on ya? Buyer beware if you found a Q6700 for $279 is my advice.

No suspicions here ... that is the advertised and confirmed price of the place I get all my hardware from...

I have bought parts from them for at least a dozen computers. I saw the price on their website and called to confirm it. They are $40 below the next lowest in town.

 

[exar333]

Q6700 and P35! Have fun.

 

[SanDiegoPC]

Originally posted by: n7
:Q

975X & P965 would be very poor choices at this point.

P35 is the way to go.

Asus P5K or P5K-E would be your "bang for buck" OCing options from Asus.

OK so I'm all ready for the P5K board - and it's cheaper than all the rest. But what's SO wrong with the 965 and 975 chipsets that made you say that they would be 'VERY' poor choices at this point?

Thanks again for your input on this. I'm learning to do as much readin' as I can before trying to OC something now.

 

[SanDiegoPC]

Originally posted by: Idontcare

Originally posted by: SanDiegoPC
Thanks Guys!

Now for the processor Q: Core2Duo or Quad? I can buy a Q6700 locally for $279 and a 3.oG E6850 for 269.

The E6750 (2.66) is just $195 thanks to the Southern CA market.

The price concerns me...you get what you pay for and $279 for a Q6700 just seems suspiciously too low.

Are you sure that isn't a Q6600? Or is someone trying to pawn a used/beat-up/burned-out Q6700 on ya? Buyer beware if you found a Q6700 for $279 is my advice.

EDIT//correction on my last response to this!! I checked their website again and either I was drunk when I read the price and called, or they have changed it. SHOULD HAVE GONE THERE WHEN I CALLED 'EM !!

The price of 279.00 is a Q6600 - 8mb Cache, 2.4Ghz processor. Thanks for keeping me on top of this! Is that a good price? They do not have the 6700 on the website now.

 

[kenny0813]

279 for a Q6600 is pretty much the price you'll see on most sites now. I'll have to agree with everyone else when I say Q6600 + P5K = win =)

 

[BlueAcolyte]

The 965 and 975 are outdated chipsets, you will not have a very long upgrade path or be able to overclock very well. P35 supports 333MHz officially, so that means your motherboard can take OCing your quad to 3.0GHz

 

[BoboKatt]

P5K-E Wifi and Q6600 G0 here. It's truly an easy setup. Runs like a dream whether you want to OC or not. Stable and runs cool.

The price for the Q6600 seems about right. Honestly for the cost of the board and that CPU you cannot go wrong and it will last you for quite some time. You still get crossfire on that P35 board if you want... comes with onboard WiFi if you get that version.

 

[Denithor]

To answer another part of your OP:

The quads tend to overclock about as well as the duals, however they definitely also generate more heat while doing it. You are going to want a Tuniq Tower ($45 at Newegg) or a Thermalright Ultra-120 Extreme (or its little brother, the Ultima-90) to keep a quad cooled if you plan to overclock.

965/975 chipset motherboards simply do not overclock as high or with as good of stability as the newer P35 motherboards. The price difference is not dramatic so just get a good quality P35 board (abit, Gigabyte, Asus and DFI are the best manufacturers these days).

Now, to the question of quad-core versus dual-core, that really depends on your uses for the system. Quad-core is major overkill for a lot of people these days but will become more useful/utilized next year and into 2009. If you are seriously into video processing, 3D rendering and/or other heavily cpu-intensive tasks (and your specific software can take advantage of four cores) by all means go for the Q6600. If this is more of a gaming and general use system a fast dual core is probably more than enough power to suit your needs (go for the e6750 and OC to 3.4-3.6GHz with a good cooler).

Also, if you decide to go dual-core, bear in mind that the Penryn duals are scheduled for a January 20 launch (they will run cooler, overclock better and have 6MB versus 4MB L2 cache). The e8200 or e8400 look like a great value at the expected price points.

 

[SanDiegoPC]

Originally posted by: Denithor
To answer another part of your OP:

The quads tend to overclock about as well as the duals, however they definitely also generate more heat while doing it. You are going to want a Tuniq Tower ($45 at Newegg) or a Thermalright Ultra-120 Extreme (or its little brother, the Ultima-90) to keep a quad cooled if you plan to overclock.

965/975 chipset motherboards simply do not overclock as high or with as good of stability as the newer P35 motherboards. The price difference is not dramatic so just get a good quality P35 board (abit, Gigabyte, Asus and DFI are the best manufacturers these days).

Now, to the question of quad-core versus dual-core, that really depends on your uses for the system. Quad-core is major overkill for a lot of people these days but will become more useful/utilized next year and into 2009. If you are seriously into video processing, 3D rendering and/or other heavily cpu-intensive tasks (and your specific software can take advantage of four cores) by all means go for the Q6600. If this is more of a gaming and general use system a fast dual core is probably more than enough power to suit your needs (go for the e6750 and OC to 3.4-3.6GHz with a good cooler).

Also, if you decide to go dual-core, bear in mind that the Penryn duals are scheduled for a January 20 launch (they will run cooler, overclock better and have 6MB versus 4MB L2 cache). The e8200 or e8400 look like a great value at the expected price points.

Thanks so much for that! Didn't know that another generation of chip was to come out in three weeks.

I'm in no hurry at all-fortunately this PC I'm working with is still running fine. It's just old! It never did OC too well, but it's been the most reliable PC I ever put together. I'm using a socket 478 P4 3.0G (Prescott) on an Asus P5B deluxe board. It has a RAID setup of WD SATA drives but they are full. 2G of Kingston RAM. All I could ever get with this setup is a 10 percent OC but it's been running at 3.3Ghz for four years now, and very VERY reliably.

What I use it for is photo processing with CS2. Also, stacking images...I'm an Astronomer. What we do, is use CCD cameras to image faint objects; hundreds of these images are stacked using special software, then imported into Photoshop.

It is this stacking process that is CPU intensive...as well as Hard Drive intensive. The stacking of hundreds of images of a far away galaxy gives a great Signal to Noise ratio over trying to take one long exposure of something that faint and fuzzy.

I tend to keep all these original raw images on the HD too, and so that makes it very full! I currently have hundreds of gigs of raw images in this existing RAID and I've got no idea what the hell to do with them!

I wanted to re-use these Western Digital drives, but it seems the best thing I can do is to just keep them full of data and buy new, larger, faster ones when I build this next PC. This RAID is 98 percent full right now and I may not be able to use this PC to process another nights' images because of drive space. Good thing I use a fixed swap file for XP.

 

[sutahz]

Since gaming is not a priority at all, means SLi and CrossFire are not necessary at all (otherwise X38 could be a recommendation).
By the sound of it, Q6600 is the way to go w/ the cpu intensive task of photo stacking.
As for hard drives, just make a new RAID array from 500GB+ hdds and you should be happy. One of the top Price/performance hdds on the market right now is the WD7500AAKS. Put 2 of those in RAID0 and I'd suspect (shot in the dark here) that w/ your new C2Q/D you'll complete tasks 4x as fast.
I'll go out on another limb here, or at least propose something to you. Switch to Vista 64bit. The biggest thing is if your special stacking program can run w/in a 64bit OS (is the stacker program 16 or 32bit?). The advantage here is when your cpu is in 64bit mode more ALU's or FPU's or something is availible which helps process things faster. W/ a 64bit OS you can also have 4-8GB of RAM availible to you (and DDR2-800 is dirt cheap). I don't know if that extra RAM would help in your line of work though.
===========================================
Thank you for not attacking me in your Quote/Bold quote/reply, your question may actually help the OP in making an informed decision. As you seem out to question my posts these days, do you know why I asked the OP if his stacking program is 16 or 32bit?
Here is the article I read that got me to switch to a 64bit OS (Vista of course). When I gave this reply I was going off what I read ealier and didnt recall word for word, but with you here now Idontcare I looked in my history and found it:
http://arstechnica.com/cpu/03q1/x86-64/x86-64-1.html its a good read.
More specifically http://arstechnica.com/cpu/03q1/x86-64/x86-64-3.html
"When running in 64-bit mode, x86-64 programmers will have access to eight additional GPRs, for a total of 16 GPRs. Furthermore, there are eight new SIMD registers, added for use in SSE/SSE2 code. So the number of GPRs and SIMD registers available to x86-64 programmers will go from eight each to sixteen each."
I guess that doesn't prove too much at face value but after reading that article I was under the impression that a running a processor in 64bit mode can yield a increase in performance. Moving to a 64bit OS is just a suggestion to potentially give the OP more of a performance boost with his new build. He could even install XP Pro 32bit and Vista 64bit to try out the 64bit OS w/o abandoning whats tried and true.

 

[Idontcare]

Originally posted by: sutahz
Since gaming is not a priority at all, means SLi and CrossFire are not necessary at all (otherwise X38 could be a recommendation).
By the sound of it, Q6600 is the way to go w/ the cpu intensive task of photo stacking.
As for hard drives, just make a new RAID array from 500GB+ hdds and you should be happy. One of the top Price/performance hdds on the market right now is the WD7500AAKS. Put 2 of those in RAID0 and I'd suspect (shot in the dark here) that w/ your new C2Q/D you'll complete tasks 4x as fast.
I'll go out on another limb here, or at least propose something to you. Switch to Vista 64bit. The biggest thing is if your special stacking program can run w/in a 64bit OS (is the stacker program 16 or 32bit?). The advantage here is when your cpu is in 64bit mode more ALU's or FPU's or something is availible which helps process things faster. W/ a 64bit OS you can also have 4-8GB of RAM availible to you (and DDR2-800 is dirt cheap). I don't know if that extra RAM would help in your line of work though.

I remember AMD making some noise about this when they first released their 64bit K8's a couple years ago. To recollection it had something to do with the "stack heap".

I never committed it to memory because no one published a performance comparison with this new feature...leading me to suspect it is one of those hardware features which adds zero performance to existing code (like SSE4, etc) until someone recompiles and publishes the optimized code.

Does anyone know if the Intel chips have the same "potential performance boost in 64bit mode" that AMD does?

Edit: Found the link on Anandtech...AMD added 8 new "General Purpose Registers" to their 64bit mode:

http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=1815&p=5

 

[Denithor]

Yep, for that kind of work you probably are one of the few people out there that will actually benefit from a quad-core processor.

Do you process lots of the photos in a batch or individually? If you handle lots of them at the same time you will almost certainly get an additional boost from going x64 and using 4GB (or even 8GB) memory.

Just make sure your stacker software runs in 32-bit mode, 16-bit software is not supported or even functional in Vista 64.

And as a side note, the Penryn Quads have apparently been delayed until "sometime later" in Q1-2008. The Duals should still be out January 20 but it will probably be February or even March before the Quads launch. So if you need the speed increase now go with the Q6600, if you can afford to wait you will probably be happier with a slightly more expensive Q9450 ($316 to retail chain, count on $350 or so at launch).

Penryn info.

EDIT: Did some further digging. Photoshop is apparently VERY memory hungry and likes to have as much system memory as possible. Check out this thread for an interesting discussion about this topic.

 

[LeftSide]

I have a quad core right now, and all I can say is wow. I've been putting off some video editing over the past year, because my single core processor was so slow it made me mad. Now all I can say is wow, there are no words. Its incredible. I wouldn't worry too much about overclocking. I mean I've overclocked my q6600 to 3 ghz and i can't tell the difference between 2.4 and 3 ghz. Now if your doing some batch photo encoding you might see an increased savings in time (depending if your software is multi-threaded), but I wouldn't worry too much about overclocking. Its also makes multi-talking a breeze. Before if I did any kind of video processing, I would have to leave the room. It wasn't worth my time to use the computer. Now I can render video, and continue doing something else. It seriously doen't even feel like I'm encoding video. Its wonderfull. I have 4 gigs of ram, that really helps too.

If your current motherboard supports quad cores, I would just skip the motherboard and invest in a quad core. I mean if it boils down to:
Great motherboard with a dual core
or
medium motherboard with a quad core

I would go for the quad core

 

[bryanW1995]

It sounds like you are not in a hurry. If that is truly the case, wait for the penryn quads to come out. They are supposed to run much cooler than the G0 conroe quads, giving you a much more enjoyable office temperature for the next 4 years. The Q9450 looks nice, but it will almost certainly be $100+ more expensive than the Q6600 at launch. You migh consider the Q9300, it won't give you a monster OC like some others (7.5x333 stock) and only has 6mb cache instead of 12mb, but it should perform at least as well as a Q6600 for you and will be a similar price.

 

[SanDiegoPC]

Originally posted by: LeftSide
I have a quad core right now, and all I can say is wow. I've been putting off some video editing over the past year, because my single core processor was so slow it made me mad. Now all I can say is wow, there are no words. Its incredible. I wouldn't worry too much about overclocking. I mean I've overclocked my q6600 to 3 ghz and i can't tell the difference between 2.4 and 3 ghz. Now if your doing some batch photo encoding you might see an increased savings in time (depending if your software is multi-threaded), but I wouldn't worry too much about overclocking. Its also makes multi-talking a breeze. Before if I did any kind of video processing, I would have to leave the room. It wasn't worth my time to use the computer. Now I can render video, and continue doing something else. It seriously doen't even feel like I'm encoding video. Its wonderfull. I have 4 gigs of ram, that really helps too.

If your current motherboard supports quad cores, I would just skip the motherboard and invest in a quad core. I mean if it boils down to:
Great motherboard with a dual core
or
medium motherboard with a quad core

I would go for the quad core

That's what I did. Q6600 and I settled for the Abit P35-Pro board. I've got it OC right now to 3.0Ghz and it's not even working hard. Two caveats so far: I'm waiting for Crucial to deliver some better ram (coming Tues). I have a couple of 1G sticks of 800Mhz RAM coming - what I have in there now is a pair of PC5300 (667) generic sticks. Surprisingly though, even with cheap crap RAM, it was still very easy to OC this chip! I didn't have room for a Tuniq tower in this case so I am so far, using the OEM Intel HSF.

When stacking my astro photos, (LINK) it gets up to 60*C so it's getting pretty warm. When I get the good RAM what I may do, is pull the CPU and the OEM heat sink off and lap them for better contact.

OTOH, 60* is actually well within the safe range, isn't it?

-Paul in San Diego

 

[SanDiegoPC]

Originally posted by: bryanW1995
It sounds like you are not in a hurry. If that is truly the case, wait for the penryn quads to come out. They are supposed to run much cooler than the G0 conroe quads, giving you a much more enjoyable office temperature for the next 4 years. The Q9450 looks nice, but it will almost certainly be $100+ more expensive than the Q6600 at launch. You migh consider the Q9300, it won't give you a monster OC like some others (7.5x333 stock) and only has 6mb cache instead of 12mb, but it should perform at least as well as a Q6600 for you and will be a similar price.

I was very tempted, but learned they were delayed. Plus, I filled the drives in the RAID that was in that old machine. I had to upgrade! Abit P35Pro and Q6600. No complaints yet!

 

[lopri]

I know that the newer chipsets are a way to go for newer CPUs (especially quads), but I can't help but to keep looking at 975X whenever I am in a situation to buy a new mobo.. Don't get me wrong I wouldn't advise anyone towards 975X with today's 1333 FSB CPUs, but there is something that other chipsets can't match the 975X. Performance, feature, stability, etc. (Besides, I'm not a big fan of this Intel's strategy of low multi + high FSB) IMO it's still very a convincing option for someone who wants to build a rig with 800/1066 FSB CPUs without a concern of upgrade.