Blogs Coffee Lake now costs less, but is Intel doing enough to win the low-end?

Maybe I'm misreading this, but XMP profiles have been available to use on all CPUs and chipsets regardless of the spec-sheet maximum speed: that's the maximum JEDEC speed, but XMP is by definition a set of non-JEDEC timings. Activating the 3000MHz XMP profile will run the DIMMs at 3000MHz regardless of the JEDEC max, even on non-Zxxx chipsets. I can't find any sources indicating this policy has changed for 3xx series.

 

That hasn’t changed, you’re right. I can run memory well above the JEDEC spec on locked down boards.

 

IDK what other people mainly look for in a low-end system outside of price but for me it's the possibility to upgrade it at a later date when funds allow and unfortunately Intel has been very anti-upgradeability for a longtime and that makes an Intel system seem very poor value for money.

 

I still don't get the "upgradability/new socket" argument against Intel - especially considering most of the people who ring that bell are also posting stuff like "happy with my Sandy/Haswell chip" or "another incremental generation, yawn".

Yeah, owners of AM4 boards can upgrade to Pinnacle Ridge, but are you honestly telling me that you'd recommend a 2600 or 2700 to someone already running a 1600 or 1700? Sure, if someone bought a placeholder 1200, upgrading to a 2700X a year later is going to be a huge upgrade, but the same can be said of someone who bought a G4400 for their Z170 board, then a year later plugged a 7700K in.

AMD being back in the game has done wonders for giving us a choice at point of purchase, as well as driving costs down for higher core counts and cheaper overall platform costs, but if you're genuinely concerned about the ability to upgrade EVERY TIME a new generation of CPU's launch, especially when those new chips are incremental upgrades at best, you need some real life problems to moan about... Like potholes.

DISCLAIMER: Not aimed at anyone in particular, just narks me to no end that so many people spent so many years COMPLAINING about how relevant the PC's they built 5/6/7 years ago are in terms of performance - then when a proper upgrade came along (Coffeelake), were all up in arms that they needed to buy a new £150 motherboard to run it. I'm sorry you bought into Kaby Lake after 5 years of running that painfully slow 4.5Ghz 2500K...

 

For me it's not so much the upgrade from one generation to the next it's the upgrade from a first generation on a particular socket to the last available, it's not the upgrading every time thing it's the extending of usability on an old system before having the bigger outlay of an entire new system.

 

Good thing it makes very little difference to real world use on Intel platforms then, eh?

 

Not sure it's like that for everyone, i know for myself on my last AMD system I was on DDR2 for a lot longer than I should be because I could just drop in a newer chip with faster cores and they were available and actually early DDR3 wasn't such a performance bump.

On my Intel systems I bought the best available and it was great until I had a motherboard problem and had to find a replacement, there weren't any, chip was EOL, system was just over 2 years old, I payed over the odds to Amazon who happened to have a board, a second time I managed to kill the CPU with fluid damage, again, no parts available ro test/debug besides buying second hand hardware, this wasn't over a large timescale.

Having had these happen it is quite nice to know there will be more parts available I can drop my chip in to or replace chip with.

I don't mind a platform upgrade if I am getting something for it, some new Whizzy tech etc, but having to upgrade platforms each time a chip drops when the underlying tech hasn't fundamentally changed is a bit lame.

I can understand why they do it, there is a large majority that don't understand firmware etc and incompatiblities that can arise if you have the wrong one, it is much easier to buy gen x chip with gen x board and know it works, than deal with returns because muppet didn't undertstand what was required to put gen y in a gen x board.