New intel processor in phase 3?

F

Fortiesboy

Guest
This is it
Intel Core i7-965 Extreme Edition

A Quad one. is anyone using it yet. ?

As several of us are about to upgrade it would be useful to know what it's like in OFF.

Any advantage over duo core E8600. Maybe not as good as most games aren't quad optimised?

Comments?
 
Most importantly, those Nehalems are a completely different socket and architectural design. Basically, they have twice the number of pins as the socket 775. Sooooo.....essentially, you'd be looking at a whole new motherboard with the X-58 chipset. Then you can chuck your current DDR2 memory in the bin. Pretty sure there's only support for DDR3 memory....which can be costly, as can a decent X-58 based mainboard.

On the bright side, the Nehalen sports an on-die 3 channel memory controller making for much faster access times and vastly superior processor memory bandwidth. It also has a couple of other nifty performance features including 8 meg of L3 Cache and Quick Path Interconnect (very much like Hypertransport). Just the number of transistors alone (731 million) makes for formidable base processing power. The benchmarks I've seen so far look quite impressive.

Unless you've got money to burn, my advice would be to hold off for several months until the prices come down to far more affordable levels.

Bottom line is, I don't think you'd see any huge benefits where CFS3/OFF is concerned. Certainly not enough to justify the cost.

The rig you're putting together now should do the job very nicely for quite some time.

Cheers Mate,


P.S.

I thought I made it quite clear to you in another conversation that I didn't want you building a rig that's any faster than mine. Stick with what you have.....:costumes:

Parky
 
Parky said:
Most importantly, those Nehalems are a completely different socket and architectural design. Basically, they have twice the number of pins as the socket 775. Sooooo.....essentially, you'd be looking at a whole new motherboard with the X-58 chipset. Then you can chuck your current DDR2 memory in the bin. Pretty sure there's only support for DDR3 memory....which can be costly, as can a decent X-58 based mainboard.

On the bright side, the Nehalen sports an on-die 3 channel memory controller making for much faster access times and vastly superior processor memory bandwidth. It also has a couple of other nifty performance features including 8 meg of L3 Cache and Quick Path Interconnect (very much like Hypertransport). Just the number of transistors alone (731 million) makes for formidable base processing power. The benchmarks I've seen so far look quite impressive.

Unless you've got money to burn, my advice would be to hold off for several months until the prices come down to far more affordable levels.

Bottom line is, I don't think you'd see any huge benefits where CFS3/OFF is concerned. Certainly not enough to justify the cost.

The rig you're putting together now should do the job very nicely for quite some time.

Cheers Mate,


P.S.

I thought I made it quite clear to you in another conversation that I didn't want you building a rig that's any faster than mine. Stick with what you have.....:costumes:

Parky
Click to expand...

Parky S!

I'll take all the above advice except the P.S. :costumes:

I asked because the firm I'm going to get to build my computer has three systems to choose from, including mix'n'match. The "best" system is now offering this new processor.
From the bit I've read this new Quad core is magic for optimised games, but not a lot better for others, i.e. CFS3 and OFF. FSX is meant to be optimised, but i play that only from time to time.
Looks like 8600 will win.
 
Hi Fortiesboy, I'm using an Intel Q6600 Quad core 2.4 Ghz. When I built it I fitted it with a large Zalman Copper cooler which will enable the CPU to be o/c 'ed to over 3.0 Ghz if I want ,so it gives me an element of expandability. Coupled with the BFG 8800gtx 768 mb video card and 4 gb ram, I am hoping to have enough horsepower to get good results from P3. Speccing computers with an eye on the future is always a problem. I'm happy with OFF2 at the moment with 1650x 1050 at 60fps, OFF3 may be different of course.
 
For what it's worth, my best friend and I each built a new PC over the last couple of weeks. We did it primarily to move up to SLI graphics and used the same 3D cards. I used a i7 EE965 CPU but he didn't. We both see the same improvement in graphics quality while flying our favorite sim. That improvement is in textures/scenery, which are clearer. My FPS jumped quite a bit but it is nearly impossible to compare systems while flying sims. Just looking out the cockpit at slightly different angles will give different results. From what I've read, even the GTX280 graphics card may be a choke point for the i7 EE965 based system. I can't say that my CPU is responsible for the graphics improvements I see, but software load times are quicker now.

I stepped up from a system that used an E8400 CPU.
 
Thank a lot fellas- food for thought.
Oh, decisions, decisions.....
I used to be indecisive, but now I'm not so sure!
 
Hello all. I guess this is my first post, but this is what I understand about multi-core processors from a few months back when I built my E8600 box.

From reading the FSX developers' blogs, I came to understand that even FSX could only partially be made to use the second core, and that any additional cores would be essentially useless to FSX itself. Since CFS3 is even older than that I can't imagine that you would see more than zero improvement over a dual-core with a quad since the main program would surely only use one core. The only advantage of even a dual-core over a single might be that background processes would use the other core.

I would be interested if this is really true once we get our greedy mitts on P3.

-Ben
 
A dual core is cheaper and can be overclocked higher than a quad core. Therefore I have chosen an Intel Core2Duo E8400 with 3 GHz clock rate which is now running at 4.05 GHz on simple air cooling. I have run it on 4.5 GHz once but this was with a 500 MHz front side bus and a littel bit unstable. Only the very expensive Extreme Edition of the Intel quad core (1000 US$) can go that fast. Currently there are only 2 games that are using more than 2 cores. And they ain't flight sims. Also the new Nehalem while being far more expensive is not faster than the current CPU. In some benchmarks about 4-5 %. And that is not noticeable by the user. I would recommend buying a board with Intel P45 chipset with DDR2-800 RAM and a E8400, E8500 or E8600. Unless you want do Crossfire with ATI graphics cards then a board with the X48 would be better. DDR3 RAM has not proven to be much faster so why burn money?
 
Fortiesboy said:
This is it
Intel Core i7-965 Extreme Edition

A Quad one. is anyone using it yet. ?

As several of us are about to upgrade it would be useful to know what it's like in OFF.

Any advantage over duo core E8600. Maybe not as good as most games aren't quad optimised?

Comments?
Click to expand...

I have a freshly built I7 system and you will see little difference if any. As with most games you will be GPU limited over CPU performance.

Most games do not utilize multiple cores and this game does not! Spend your money on graphic cards. I was playing OFF2 on a QX6700 with 2 8800 GTX's and the graphics were outstanding in 19x12!

Now I am playing OFF2 with the I7 and 2 280 GTX's in 25x16 and it does not feel much faster. However, the eye-candy is incredible to say the least.

Of course, the 30" Samsung has something to do with it.

BTW, if any one wants a proven MB, CPU and excellent RAM, please let me know! I would like to see this setup go to a good home.
 
Only if you throw in your new gaming mousepad ;)


Cheers Mate,

Parky
 
theseeker said:
I have a freshly built I7 system and you will see little difference if any. As with most games you will be GPU limited over CPU performance.



Now I am playing OFF2 with the I7 and 2 280 GTX's in 25x16 and it does not feel much faster. However, the eye-candy is incredible to say the least.

Of course, the 30" Samsung has something to do with it.

.
Click to expand...

My ! That is some system!- Do you have all the sliders at 5, - if not, where?
 
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