That's not entirely true now, more games are being coded to take advantage of more cores. And yes, clockspeed is a deciding factor, but so are a lot of other variables. Oh, and I reckon your right on the E8400, use the rest of the money on a pair on GTX295's
Lol well, there's that but also I may be building a rig at christmas and I wanted people's opinions, It wont be £1000 it will be much lower but I want to see people opinions of the best of the best, speaking of which is 200mm > 2 x 120mm?
Considering you will be building around the end of the year ts pointless to ask just now as the i5 will be out as well as the 1st DX11 cards so depending on pricing for the new graphics cards the rigs mentioned above wont be nearly as good as one build using newer parts yet to be released.
At 1600x1200 anything will do just fine. Just DO NOT START YET ANOTHER AMD/INTEL DEBATE FFS! Antec 300 Be Quiet! Dark Power Pro 650W / Corsair 600-something suitable phenom/i920 + cooler suitable mobo 4 GBs ram HD4890 / GTX285 TB HDD Win 7 RC Should be ~900 of any currency. 100 moneys worth of ice cream for coolness factor, so that you don't have to spend your money on gaminxxxx series crap.
Yeah but I speaking in general terms that games tend to prefer CPUs with higer clock rates. Usually. Or at least that's what I've heard
Not to mention the price of anything current would probably have fallen (not counting the core i7 of course). I'd be VERY curious to see how Lynnfield and X11 cards perform I have to say Just found this: http://www.guru3d.com/news/core-i5-test-leakedlynnfield-perforamnce-revealed/
Well, as I was trying to say in my post, it doesn't matter. It's all about the sheer amount of computational throughput, which isn't reliant on clock rate. Is the E8400 better value for money than i7 for gaming? Arguably, yes, but it doesn't help the fact that a lower clocked i7 will always be faster, just because it performs more calculations per clock cycle. Just like you can't compare the performance of AMD and Intel chips purely based on clock rate, you can't compare two Intel CPUs with different architectures, as the newer one will always be faster clock for clock. So in short, no, games don't necessarily prefer higher clock rates. However, if you were to compare a higher clocked dual-core C2D with a lower clocked C2Q, then yes, the faster C2D will generally win out in most games.
Just bought myself one of these, i must say i was impressed! Went a bit crazy and got 8gigs of 1600mhz ram, and it just eats up DVD encoding! Looking at about 25 mins for a full DVD to AVI...suits me fine! Running pretty much all my games on my 8800GT AMP @ 1680X1050 oh high ish settings. Just my 2 pennies! good luck with the build : )
If your a pure enthusiast then why would you wait for the i5? Isn't the whole idea a cheaper downgrade to the i7, a mainstream version if you will, bearing in mind i7 was kinda meant to be enthusiast then the only advantage I see in making the i5 is to take over from the Core 2 series once and for all and attempt to make DDR3/QPI mainstream So basically, even if someone was making a crazy rig at christmas then they would still pick the i7 over the i5... As for DX11 , is it gonna be as revolutionary as DX10 vs DX9? Cos if it is then I can't wait (sarcasm).
You probably won't be able to build a core i7 system at christmas... Well, not as we know it at any rate. An enthusiast isn't just about getting the fastest of them all. It's about being passionate about it and trying to get best you can which includes value for money and a budget. Apparently (and again this is just what i've heard) Direct X11 is meant to be quite a big step forward. Just how well it's implemented and taken up is another story entirely of course...
