Gents, before he is misled, the i7 860 DOES have HT. I know, I'm using one for my testing/review rig for the express purpose of the fact that I can turn it off and adjust clocks to make an i5 750 out of it for cooler reviews. That and it makes compiling for my game faster.
@OP, you fortuitously purchased an individual E7200 that was capable of 4.1GHz at low temperature. This does not make you an overclocking god, it makes you lucky. If the Xeon isn't on the supported list for your motherboard (it probably won't be as you're looking at consumer 'boards) then you will void your warranty by installing it, this may or may not be of concern to you. If it is unsupported then you may need to flash the BIOS with a modded BIOS from a higher-spec motherboard that supports Xeon CPUs. I agree that the Xeon is compelling on price/performance. However it may be better to save money where you can and spend more on graphics. It has been shown time-and-again that the graphics card makes the biggest difference to gaming performance. On the topic of graphics, SLI/Crossfire technology is now quite mature. Some games are achieving 97% scaling for 2 cards. It can no longer be argued that a single more powerful card is superior. As was pointed out earlier, ATi have the price/performance crown at the moment so you may want to look at the HD58xx series.
Ok thanks for the reply...looking forward to some more technical side of the subject...also could you please explain how the BIOS can be tweaked? I mean are there already options in 'normal' Gigabyte, Asus bios to achieve this or does one have to get custom BIOS?
Thanks for the reply... 1. Firstly, I did not say that I was some kind of overclocking guru or something....I just said that I was, quoting myself, "a bit better than a n00b"...and yeah I know that I was very lucky that my processor came from a good batch...like my GPU came from a not-so-good batch and wont overclock even a bit... 2. Secondly it DOES NOT void warranty, I am sure of that....but overclocking certainly voids it and yeah I will be overclocking my CPU, whichever I get - the Thuban, i5 or an i7... 3. And yeah I will consider SLI if my budget allows...
he didnt mean the actual fitting of the CPU, he meant if its unsupported then flashing an unofficial BIOS will void the warranty.
id still go for the 5870 not an SLI route or the toasty bank loan job for a 470. SLI/crossfire scales well on SOME games not all so your performance will vary depending on driver maturity, the game coding and what the weathers like outside ! (ignore last). This is the reason to stay away from it you will not get consistant performance out of it anything between 0-100%. so your SLI/xfire may in some games be effectively reduced to almost single card performance which if you buy mid-range cards will not run games @ 1980x1080 with AA and AF
A bit of it is just understanding the CPU data sheet arcanum If you look up DCU prefetcher, you should find some discussions about server specific prefetcher stuff. I'm still looking at what detail I can go into on the subject though.
Finding stuff is one thing and finding stuff and then being able to understand it is another Ill look it up and see what I find...also get what you can on the subject too...and yeah thanks again for looking it up for me...
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~jom5x/papers/chr.pdf That's the best I can do at the moment though it looks like it is a bit on the older side. I don't see the information I know listed anywhere publicly
P55 vs x58... P55 doesn't have enough bandwidth to take 2 or more graphics card or 1 graphics card + SATA6/USB3. x58 has enough for 2 graphics card or 1 graphics + SATA6/USB3. It doesn't have enough for 2 graphics card + SATA6/USB3. Since I wanted to future proof myself with USB3 and I only use 1 graphics card, I sold my P55 system to a mate and bought the x58. Rumour has it x68 will be out late 2011 - which will have no such limitations.
The link takes me to a page where it says that I do not have enough privileges to view the page.. I am currently in Pakistan and God-Willing, going to Canada for Bachelors from UWaterloo... Here is something I found on Intel's website on prefetching... http://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2009/08/24/what-you-need-to-know-about-prefetching/ From what I read here, it seems that processor only does low level prefetching as if it didn't know what was going on at the higher level...at lower level only basic prefetching such as addresses or instruction or data may be prefetched which, I believe will be same for a server-oriented application and a consumer application...so I think there will not be any major difference between the prefetchers of either CPU...
