That's a good point I forgot about that, personally I reckon they're gonna wait for a week or two for their mobo reviews to see whether LGA1156 is a more cost effective setup than an i7920
I'm busy testing 5 LGA1156 boards to work out which one to recommend!! Actually I started it this morning, we had a short meeting and it'll be next week. Late, yes, but we feel we can't recommend what we don't know fully.
Grrrr, I've got the next week off, money saved burning a hole in my pocket, and after considering that the Phenom X3 was a good budget choice and the AM3 had more legs than the other sockets, save the i5/i7, I've now had my interest captured by the i5s. But I'm in a no mans land as I've got little info on what to buy for an i5 rig. I'm going to have to wait a bit longer now.
Phenom X 3 is much more valuable than i series,cause i series is not popular now in the famalies,P X3 is popular cause it can upgrade to Quad,though there is rate of success.
Any chance you could let on which 5 LGA1156 boards your testing I'm intrigued as to why you say the i series isn't popular now in the families, your saying that the Phenom X3 is popular because it can be upgraded to Quad but forgive me for saying but ALL i5 and i7 processors are Quad processors and I'm sure there will be more i5/i7 CPU's made available for the new 1156 platform before much longer, as all I can find are the 3 listed below and on this website http://www.ebuyer.com/search?store=2&cat=22&subcat=2955. Intel Core i5 750 2.66GHz Socket LGA1156 8MB L3 Cache Retail Boxed Processor £149.99 Inc VAT Intel Core i7 860 2.8GHz Socket LGA 1156 8MB L3 Cache Retail Boxed Processor £219.38 Inc VAT Intel Core i7 870 2.93GHz Socket LGA 1156 8MB L3 Cache Retail Boxed Processor £429.99 One thing that has baffled me though why the hell is the price difference between the 860 and 870 i7's so massive considering the only difference is a rather pathetic 193 mhz speed increase for the 870!
Because Intel can. Look at i7 950 versus 975. The people in the US have a far better deal on the 860 than we do
So, what would be the best option for me; to wait for the i5, as a mate of mine said I should, and I've got to admit, I like the idea of, or go for the Phenom X3? I've heard that the X3 is actually a good choice for gaming, and I've seen results that show that having three cores rather than two or four actually give a boost to performance and framerates. I'll lay out the facts: 1. I'm a gamer at heart 2. I'm not into overclocking or unlocking cores 3. I don't fold, do multimedia or music creation 4. I download, watch films, play games, listen to music, browse t'intermesh, forumise, and other normal things with my current rig. I want an upgrade path for the platform I choose (says the guy who went for a 3800+ XP the month before the Core 2 Duo was first released ), and, obviously i5 has that in spades, but I understand that the new Phenoms and AM3 has legs as a socket platform too. I don't want to get stung buy the Early Adopters Premium, so if I went for i5, I won't be building anything in the next week, or perhaps even the next month or so. I've always been an AMD/Nvidia man, though obviously as soon as I went for the 939s, the dominance flipped to Intel and they lead the market up to now, and I expected to be going for a Core 2 Duo until I heard about the Phenoms, and then the i5s came to my attention. Why can't it be simple? Oh, and sorry for the thread hijack.
C'mon guys, there's clearly two schools of thought here; either stick to the idea of AM3 as it's more suited to a gamers needs so I've heard (there's only so many frames that you need), or the new i5s which are more expensive, though are affordable i7s in a slightly different cloth, with grunt to get higher FPS, but having skimmed over the article on the front page about comparing Core 2 Quads, i7s and i5s, there's something about actually reaching the limits of PCI-E 2.0 before the end of the technology's life. I just don't know what's best here, as both i5 and AM3 have life left in them, both should give good performance, but some of you guys favour one over the other. I'm just looking for the reasons why, and some pokes in the right direction. Well, the best direction. Overall. On average. According to opinion. Generally.
I don't suppose you'll be getting the Gigabyte P55-UD3R in any time soon, will you? As I didn't get the GD65 from ebuyer I've been looking for another board for around £100. The UD3R is currently £97 on Scan which is about the sweet spot for me as I don't really want to pay full price for the MSI board. I know Gigabyte boards have generally been pretty good of late and the P45 and X58 versions of the UD3R were two of the best boards in terms of value for money on their respective chipsets, so I hope this one isn't any different. The only thing that bothers me is that the second PCI-e x16 slot only runs at x4 (so is x16/x4 rather than x8/x8 for SLI/Crossfire), although admittedly it's only a minor issue as I doubt I'll be running a multiple card setup in the foreseeable future.
I absolutely agree! We have the UD4M in which is a bit too expensive at £120 for a mATX, and MSI CD53 that I havent had time to test properly yet, and the Asus P7P55D vanilla.
