What to choose: Core i7 860 or Core i7 920?

[yacoub]

Originally posted by: The Sneaker
Hi
I'm buying a new comp. next week, had the money allready two weeks ago but decided to wait and see how the new Lynnfield based processors would perform. Now I'm just even more confused.
I'm not a big overclocker so I do not know if I'm going to do that, at least not in the beginning. I have about 2500 $ for the rig and would like to do some gaming, dont have to make any work that is especially demanding other than word and so and running some simulators.

As I see there are some pros and cons of them both and they are: (and plz correct me if I'm wrong)

860: + New turbo (much better than the 920), + faster than the 920 in many ways because of the clock speed, - 2x16x PCI express 2.0 and therefore a little less GPU power when running SLI/Crossfire., - manual overclockable

920: + Easy overclockable, + support for 2x16x PCI express 2.0, so enough bandwidth for high end gaming. + 1366 socket will support the coming gulftown processor, - slower than the 860 in some cases

Look back over your last three years of PC hardware purchases: Do you tend to spend lots of money on hardware? If you did, was purchasing the more expensive higher-end parts REALLY necessary to have that extra ~5% performance, given your actual usage of the system? Do you care about bragging rights? Do you historically burn money on multiple GPUs? Do you anticipate running two GPUs will saturate two 8x PCIe channels to a point of penalty, which hasn't really happened yet in any normal usage testing for current games?

If yes to those, get i7 920. If not, get a P55 system.

For 99.9% of people, P55-based systems will be all the performance of i7 920 and won't out-date or limit themselves quickly enough to be a concern. And they'll save money buying the more affordable system.

Crossfire/SLI is irrelevant for >90% of us because it's simply unnecessary. Sure, if someone wants epeen, they buy a second GPU to have higher benchmark numbers and then to support it they have to upgrade to a higher wattage PSU that costs more and raises their electric bill, and they have already spent more on a higher-end motherboard, etc. It's really just a big money sink. A great marketing gimmick but not much else positive. More heat, more noise, more power used, more cost, more parts replaced to support it. If you don't care about all the downsides, then by all means go for it. Yeah yeah, there's like two people out there who actually buy one GPU now with the intention to buy a second one a year down the road (if they can still find that model in stock anymore) and do SLI to keep their system competitive a year later and that's fine and all, but that's not the norm or worth considering up front for most of us. For most of us SLI is simply unnecessary AND we're better off buying a single GPU initially and replacing it with a two-generation-newer single GPU a year or two later when the old one starts to feel inadequate in games.
And you can do SLI on a P55 system if you still want.

But why spend $2500 when you can spend half that and get just about all of the performance and save some money.

 

[Maverick2002]

Unless you're a) hardcore overclocker or b) use all cores and max memory bandwidth all the time (very unlikely, most rendering/simulation apps don't even do this), I don't see the point in getting a 920. With regards to upgrade path, only those who do serious 3d rendering (not to be confused with gaming) or run intense simulations are going to use all 6 potential cores. 1366 is more or less a desktop version of a server.

That said I wouldn't drop $2500 on a system either unless money is absolutely not an issue for you. You'll be better off spending $1500 now and $1000 a year or two from now, which will net you 90% performance of a $2500 system now and 150% performance in a little bit. Make sense?

 

[The Sneaker]

So you both (yacoub and Maverick2002) would recommend me to buy the i7 860 instead of the i7 920 based on my needs (no interest in overclocking, not willing to upgrade the cpu in at least a year, and at least no SLI/CF in a years time I think) Even though the CPU+MB+Ram are priced around the same for the 920 & 860 in my country ? price diff. is about 80-100 $. The 1156 system with CPU+MB+Ram cost about 770$. 920 + the metioned diff.

Thanks.

 

[The Sneaker]

sry Ram = Memory