You mean May 11th for Z68 ? Intel didn't confirm the date, but in reality it is pretty much 100% they will launch that day.
Arrr, that's closer than I'd hoped. Now for a couple of good reviews, and I can finally get my new rig. (haven't decided on Z or P yet) Ummm, little slip-up from my side there, I thought as H67 and P67 are out, it'd be called Z67, but it's Z68. Thanks!
Still holding out for LGA2011. Hmm, an SSD acting as a cache? Sounds like a nice feature. Looks like my scratch drive will have a new use for itself come the next major rebuild.
well, tbh, if it wouldn't have been for the P67 error, i'd have gone for that a few months ago. And was about to order X58 about 2 days before Sandybridge came out. Now Z68 is around the corner, I can wait for that... LGA2011 is just too far away, and I guess a 2500k with a beefy graphicscard should push me along a couple of years, I don't see me needing more computational power, we're bottlenecked at the graphics-level I'd say Anyway May-June is a good time for buying hardware, long time before the next christmas priceshift.
As is said on many a forum thread here and all over the tech world; "If you keep waiting for the next best tech to come out, you will never get a new PC! As there's always something new being announced." Buy now or forever hold your cash! That said, i bought a vertex2, only to have the vertex3 released to retail 4 days later So if the wait is less than say a month, wait.. Otherwise get whats good now. In regards to the SSD caching, I believe the idea is to buy a small cheap SSD (say 32-64GB) to use to speed up your HDD, making it kind of a "cheap and nasty" fix. If you can afford it, you're probably better off buying a bigger, around 120GB SSD and not bother with the caching. Pure SSD Speed will always out perform the hybrid solution. Just look at Seagate's Momentus XT, better than a HDD, but still nothing compared to a decent SSD.
Seagate uses only 4GB of NAND, Intel requires more. I've not tested it myself, but considering it's Intel tech it should work very well.
Is there any reason to go Z68 over P67? I doubt I'd take advantage of the SSD caching. I'm about to order a new system this week and not sure if I should hold out a couple of weeks if there are significant benefits. I presume the Z68 shall have a premium cost too?
You can overclock AND use the internal graphics at the same time. This would be a premium board for someone like me with multiple monitors, but the need to only game on one of them. I can use my "gaming monitor" with my GPU, and hook up the rest of my monitors to the internal GPU and save cash this way.
For as far as I've understood it boils down to three points: You can use the internal graphics for things like encoding/recoding, which is as fast or faster than CUDA/BADA based, but not quite as "clean" as using CPU only. quite extensive THG test You can use the internal video for accellerating video playback while letting you discrete graphics card at idle, saving you noise and power. (this however requires additional software like Lucid Virtu) You get the Hybrid-drive thingy, which I cannot judge until it's tested. (HDD only vs. Hybrid vs. SSD + HDD) Claims abound here(Asrock Z68) The next question is price...it may not be more expensive than a quality P57, while allowing you these three benefits...(and some other)
I bought the P67A-UD4-B3 because of this, and i'm not sure i will keep it, this board is giving me headaches when i try to overclock it. On other side, the only other manufacturer really making black boards is EVGA, and they have yet to start sell their P67 boards. If they will sell them at all. Tell me about it. I had a SSD i bought for 320 euro without VAT on RMA, and they offered me Corsair Nova 120GB first, i rejected and then they offered me Corsair Force 120GB which i reluctantly accepted - just to be Vertex 3 available 1-2 weeks later. Oh well, at least i have Corsair Force 120GB with the longest warranty period on market (as the warranty stays from the original product, which means 10 years minus the 1 and half year i owned the original product). Looking forward to next free upgrade when Corsair Force 120GB dies . Actually, the capacity you mentoin is too big. Intel is preparing a special 20GB SSD for this. Yep, this is one of the reasons i think about swapping my P67A-UD4-B3 for some Z68 board. Goodbye DisplayLink USB adapter (it has some minor issues, nothing big but annoying enough), goodbye passive XFX 8400GS, nicknamed superheater (80C in idle).
I quite like the idea of using onboard graphics when the gpu isn't required. Hmm, to wait for release or not?
If you don't care about SSD caching, using Quicksync, the (marginal.. depending on # of graphics card used) power saving of switching off graphics cards then P67 is still an ideal answer. faugusztin - Actually you haven't got all the details yet. Some are missing. Just saying since OP is decision making here.
Power saving is not marginal when you have 2 different displays on one NVIDIA card, because the card runs at full freq in this case.
I'm sure a recent CPC/Bit-tech podcast alluded to better (base) overclocking potential than P67 as well (or something?) I wait with bated breath, as I will be choosing a motherboard for a new Sandybridge build as soon as I have all the facts! TSB
That would be very interesting, but the Podcast is "spoken word" so I can't quote it. Once this is written down we'll see. Or are there transcriptions available? (as I can't hear the podcast at work)
REALLY? That must be prime-time for a driver fix. Having said that, I'm not sure how Z68 handles multi-monitor.