Who is going to skip 1156/1366, and wait for Bulldozer?

[Cogman]

I'll upgrade when I feel that my Q6600 is going too slow, until then, there is no point. The Q6600 is really a pretty good CPU even today, for what I do, I doubt I would see a huge difference going to a faster CPU with the current generation.

If the bulldozer doesn't offer significant benefits, I probably won't get it either.

 

[Hey Zeus]

1.) I don't upgrade one generation to the next
2.) I don't overpay for sh*t

Bulldozer

Then why buy Amd? It's shit just not overpriced ^_^

I'm waiting for the 32nm Quad's

 

[RussianSensation]

Lest you think I'm an AMD fanboy - I've purchased 2xQ6600, 2xQ9400, 2xQ9550, 3xQ8200

Obviously, the longer you play the waiting game, the better technology will be around. However, with this logic you can wait forever. Instead you should have sold your Q6600 and ram and mobo long time ago and upgraded to Core i7 860 on the cheap, or even Core i5 750 when it was $150. Instead you bought what are more or less the same processors (same generation) for little to no benefit.

Often you can time the sale of your old parts before no one really wants them. I would say Q6600 is nearing its end and it's time to dump it (a lot of users with E6400/6600 and so on want a cheap quad upgrade on S775). Plus now you can already get SATA 3 and USB 3 on P55. That's what I did and my net upgrade cost for mobo+cpu+ram was less than the price of the i7 860. I enjoyed the benefits of the i7 since September 8, 2009 and many people did even better and got the 920 6 months before that.

To each his own. Of course Q6600 @ 3.6ghz is a fine system but when I switched to Core i7 860 my framerates increased from 55fps to 78 fps in Resident Evil 5 at 1920x1080 4AA (that's 42% performance improvement). Current games like Dragon Age also benefit significantly from Core i7 OCed.

All things taken into account though, if your system is performing to your expectations, there is no need to upgrade.

 

[cbn]

The one thing I like about AMD is their power management. Cool-n-quiet sounds so much better than Speedstep.

Lets hope AMD delivers on the Turbo mode in the same way. That way even if the cores end up being smaller they will still deliver in single and dual threaded tasks.

 

[yh125d]

The one thing I like about AMD is their power management. Cool-n-quiet sounds so much better than Speedstep.
Lets hope AMD delivers on the Turbo mode in the same way. That way even if the cores end up being smaller they will still deliver in single and dual threaded tasks.

Thats the only thing you like about AMD or just one of the things? Either way,




But yeah, turbo is the best idea either company has had since... well... multiple cores

 

[VirtualLarry]

Obviously, the longer you play the waiting game, the better technology will be around. However, with this logic you can wait forever. Instead you should have sold your Q6600 and ram and mobo long time ago and upgraded to Core i7 860 on the cheap, or even Core i5 750 when it was $150. Instead you bought what are more or less the same processors (same generation) for little to no benefit.

As opposed to buying the new CPUs, and spending extra money, for also little to no benefit.
(The only advantage a 4Ghz i7 920 has over a 4Ghz Q9550, is video editing, really.)

Often you can time the sale of your old parts before no one really wants them. I would say Q6600 is nearing its end and it's time to dump it (a lot of users with E6400/6600 and so on want a cheap quad upgrade on S775). Plus now you can already get SATA 3 and USB 3 on P55. That's what I did and my net upgrade cost for mobo+cpu+ram was less than the price of the i7 860. I enjoyed the benefits of the i7 since September 8, 2009 and many people did even better and got the 920 6 months before that.

I guess I just don't see the advantage of the i7 over the C2Q for the vast majority of apps. And current support for USB3/SATA3 is half-assed, with add-on chips and stealing PCI-E lanes. I don't like compromises like that, I'll wait until all of those new technologies are natively integrated.

To each his own. Of course Q6600 @ 3.6ghz is a fine system but when I switched to Core i7 860 my framerates increased from 55fps to 78 fps in Resident Evil 5 at 1920x1080 4AA (that's 42% performance improvement). Current games like Dragon Age also benefit significantly from Core i7 OCed.

All things taken into account though, if your system is performing to your expectations, there is no need to upgrade.

Interesting benchmark results. What speed was the i7 860 clocked at, not stock certainly.

 

[Golgatha]

I'm waiting at least till SB. I don't feel a need to upgrade right now as my current rig performs marvelously for what I do. When SB comes out, I will re-evaluate. If there is a tangible benefit to upgrading, I will. If not, I'll keep on trucking. With the way software is moving tho, I'm prob just going to keep upgrading gfx cards until my cpu burns out (I'm sure Intel/AMD are happy to hear that...)!

AMD is probably cool with it either way.

I upgraded to an i7 920 and have been nothing be happy with it. If I just played games on my computer, I wouldn't have bothered, but I do a lot of video encoding and transcoding, so it was a huge leap forward for those tasks. I will however probably skip Bulldozer, as what I have now is plenty fast and my X58 motherboard supports both SLI and Crossfire, so all my gaming bases are thoroughly covered.

 

[hclarkjr]

seeing as how i just bought a DQ6 motherboard and 9450 i think i will skip them till much later ^_^

 

[v8envy]

What could you possibly do on a i7 that you can't do right now with your current quads? If you can answer that, there you go. Upgrade. If, more likely, you can't: once again, there you go.

 

[ochadd]

My Q9550 @ 3.8 gives up very little in the gaming department. Went from a dual core to quad core for a total expense of $100 after selling off the old CPU.

Socket 775 upgrade :
$100

Socket 1366 upgrade:
$290 CPU
$200 MB
$100 memory

When all is said and done I can nearly pay for all my PC games this year just by holding off. The downside is having to give up 5-10 fps on games that already run at 30 or 60 fps. It's a no brainer for me.

 

[Nemesis 1]

Yea 2011 as far as Cpus go will be interesting, AMD is interesting . But I will go Intel no matter whos on top in performance. Sandy Bridge all the way for me. Performance is so high now I just don't care anymore . So I go with the company that in my opinion is pushing the envolope. To me thats Intel.

 

[Nemesis 1]

Oh yea . your poll isn't very good many of us are already up to date . I will skip the six core Nehalems as I now have 2/and 4 core

 

[ZipSpeed]

My Q9550 has plenty of muscle for what I need it to do. In the meantime, I'm waiting for Fermi to see what it can do and then upgrade the video card. I also want a SSD. Both should offer an actual tangible difference.

 

[Munky]

No, I skipped the Core2 generation and upgraded to i7. And I will most likely skip Bulldozer. It depends what your previous rig was, for anyone not on a fast C2Quad already, I would not recommend waiting.

 

[lopri]

I guess I just don't see the advantage of the i7 over the C2Q for the vast majority of apps.

I suppose that's true for the 'majority of users'. (Sorry I couldn't put it any other way ). But if you're a 'power user' who does heavy multitasking as well as encoding, i5/i7 is much more suitable platform, IMO.

The C2Q is great in a production environment running well threaded applications, especially those that do well on Intel architecture. However, when it comes to multitasking, the desktop C2Q's don't fare well against i5/i7 and PII. I did experience it first hand, and it looks like reviews around the web also confirm my findings.

I have moved to 8GB since Vista came out, and last year I got into VMs as well. My system is always using at least 3~4GB of RAM and when I start working/playing the memory usage can go up to 6GB. Sometimes, C2Q simply crapped out (pause, BSOD, or hang) and it'd mean that I lose work and progress in games.

The blame is probably on the chipset/board rather than the CPU, but they're still part of the ecosystem. (FB-DIMMs are out of question on desktops, obviously) And i5/i7 removes such bottleneck.

Again, I don't expect this scenario would apply to majority of users, but if you're running multiple heavy apps or are multitasking heavily, the benefit can not just be performance but can also be to crash or not to crash.

Well, as for Bulldozer and SandyBridge - they are way too unknown and far away to be a consideration. If you're happy with what you've got now, then no reason to upgrade. But if you're unhappy or see room for improvement, putting off upgrades waiting for BD/SB sounds silly.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Again, I don't expect this scenario would apply to majority of users, but if you're running multiple heavy apps or are multitasking heavily, the benefit can not just be performance but can also be to crash or not to crash.

I'm sorry, but that sounds just like internet fud. There's nothing unstable about a properly-running 775 platform.

 

[lopri]

The crash part is indeed something that can't be verified in a repetable fashion. (though I imagine I could devise a scenario where it'd happen) So yeah, it can only be anecdotal, and I don't intend to spread any FUD. But the performance difference under multitasking scenario can be found around the web. C2Q flat-out loses to i5/i7. And to PII.

 

[soccerballtux]

The crash part is indeed something that can't be verified in a repetable fashion. (though I imagine I could devise a scenario where it'd happen) So yeah, it can only be anecdotal, and I don't intend to spread any FUD. But the performance difference under multitasking scenario can be found around the web. C2Q flat-out loses to i5/i7. And to PII.

At processor speeds these days they're all so fast it really doesn't matter-- 10 second vs 8 seconds does it really justify spending twice as much? Nah... Just get whatever you can afford. No normal user does 2 hours a day heavy encoding stuff anyways.

 

[lopri]

No normal user does 2 hours a day heavy encoding stuff anyways.

They do it while they sleep. :hmm: Sometimes I set affinity to two cores while I do other stuff.

 

[aigomorla]

I am gonna skip the LGA1156 platform.

I really don't see the point in that platform for someone like me.

No normal user does 2 hours a day heavy encoding stuff anyways.

I dont think ive had a encoding job which even took 2 hours. :T

 

[MagickMan]

My Q9550 will be fine until next gen.

 

[drizek]

I think my X3 720 is more or less fine. I might get a Thuban if they support Turbo Mode as has been suggested. Otherwise, I see no reason to pay for Nehalem, and I would be opposed to thuban altogether if it meant any sacrifice at all in single threaded performance.

Right now I think the smart thing to buy is Westmere. If you already have 45nm hardware, there is little point to getting Nehalem. On the other hand, it is a great time to get a new laptop, HTPC or Gulftown server. Clarkdale also seems like a barrel of laughs to overclock(I'm hoping that arrandale can get some comfortable undervolting as well).

 

[RussianSensation]

Interesting benchmark results. What speed was the i7 860 clocked at, not stock certainly.

Ok here are my results that I pulled when I recorded them when I still had the Q6600 before upgrading (Direct X 9.0c, Resident Evil, Fixed benchmark, Catalyst 9.9)

Q6600 @ 3.4ghz, 6 gigs of ram, 4890

1280x1024 4AA = 60.8
1680x1050 0AA = 57.8
1680x1050 4AA = 57.8
1920x1080 0AA = 54.6
1920x1080 4AA = 55.1

Core i7 860 Stock with Turbo Enabled, 4 Gigs of Ram, 4890 (no overclocking), Cats 9.9:

1280x1024 4AA = 110.3
1680x1050 0AA = 98.7
1680x1050 4AA = 90.9
1920x1080 0AA = 89.4
1920x1080 4AA = 82.1 (+49&#37
1920x1080 8AA = 77.6

Core i7 860 @ 3.9ghz no Turbo, 4 Gigs of Ram, 4890, Cats 9.9:

1280x1024 4AA = 111.5
1680x1050 0AA = 106.0
1680x1050 4AA = 89.3
1920x1080 0AA = 94.7
1920x1080 4AA = 81.6 (+48%)
1920x1080 8AA = 77.3

You can ask someone else with a similar setup (Munky above) to verify these numbers or run your own and see what you get with your setup. Of course this is only 1 game. But you can add GTAIV to this list and Dragon Age as well. WinRAR extraction, Distributed Computing, conversion of FLAC into MP3, you name it. IF you don't do any of these, obviously you won't see benefits of Core i7.

 

[TuxDave]

Upgrade to 1156/1366 now 28 33.33%
Wait for Bulldozer 28 33.33%
Wait for Sandy Bridge or later Intel chips to upgrade 28 33.33%

lol

 

[zsdersw]

Lest you think I'm an AMD fanboy

A better thread title would've been: "Who is going to skip 1156/1366 and wait for Bulldozer or Sandy Bridge?"