that would be downgrade, since Clarkendale is a dual-core. go for a Gigabyte P55A or an Asus board that has feature list you want. without knowing which feature is important to you, it's really hard to recommend one.
I couldn't agree more. The 860 is probably the best chip available for the 1156 platform at present. (unless you want to oc; in which case a 750 is don) The intergrated graphics on the i5 and i3 cpus are not aimed at gaming. And that's being polite.
860 is as high as 1156 will go is the problem. If you dont want to upgrade its the way to go advantage of buying the 930 is if its not enough performance 1 year later you can put the 980 in. Personally im part of a money no object or care crew and will buy best performance that gives upgrade potential. There is 0 upgrade potential on the 1156 platform i still from a neutral perspective if you dont want to pay 860/930 price 750 is still the best cpu at the price range. And for gaming its more than enough, Id even say its overkill. if you must pick 860 or 930 id go 930 for just its upgradeability. as for the tri channel is better performance in high memory usage programs i know for a fact it is. I run adobe cs5 suite and alot of the programs in it like 6-8gb of memory to really run properly. ( use this on a day to day basis work related ) if you overclock the 930 to 4ghz and the 860 to 4ghz the heat dif between them will likely be very very small. Comes down to this If you have the money 930 (980 if you really money no object) all the way if you dont have the money 750 ( if you mainly game) or 860 ( if you run other programs but games) other programs isnt microsoft office lol example of that would be photo editing and movie editing. If its strictly a gaming cpu your wasting hundreds of pounds for little gain that could be spent on a graphics card. 750 + 5870 beats 860 + 5850. moto of the day know what your building your pc for and build a pc around it and also try to set a budget for your build and stick to it. If you set no budget you do what i did and end up with nearly every high end peace including motherboard and ssd drivers ect. which probably costs £1000 more and gives 5% more kinda stupidity
+1 I still don't understand why anyone would buy an 860 when the 750 is available. Okay, you lose hyperthreading - big deal! Your virus scans will just have to take a little longer. If you're considering the 860, you should actually be looking at an i7 920.
This is all useful information. It's very helpful, than k you very much! It sounds like I need to choose between a budget setup based on i5 750 or a high spec setup based on the i7 930. Just so you know, the 1156 Mobo can acomodate the i7 870 whcih is a tep up from the 860. Not sure if any further upgrade is possible.
Thanks for your post, The thing is, it is very difficult for me to decide wehther hyperthreading makes a noiticaable difference. Do you know the difference in real world performance between the 860, 930 and the 750?
Clock for clock, the processors perform the same. Hyper threading can either be slightly beneficial or pretty much add nothing. I run my CPU without hyper threading due to: 1) Lower temps (would probably kill my CPU if I turned HT on!) 2) Some applications I run need real cores rather than 'fake' cores. 3) One game I play, X3 Reunion, actually takes a performance hit from HT.
actually, Sandy-Bridge will be for LGA1156 to upgrade to later this year or Q1 next year. whereas on Bit-tech news, rumour has it that LGA1366 will be ended soon with quad-channel CPU coming to replace the top spot. so in that sense, LGA1156 is like LGA775, it will leap cross generations, and have amp upgrade path. HT does indeed adds little to CPU. i have gone from i5 750 to i7 860 and i can safely say all it adds is about 10c higher core temperature. i have not noticed any real world advantages to my upgrade.
I thought that the advantage in using the i7 over i5 CPUs is the former's ability to use it's core procesing power dynamically. It was my understanding that i5 could use one core for one process but the i7 will be able to use more than one core symultaniously to run a process. Have I misunderstood?
No you're pretty much spot on there mate. It's generally refered to as Hyperthreading though where one core can run two processing threads Simultaneously , i.e 4 cores / 8 threads for an 860.
that is absolutely correct. but the added threads is only advantages to massively multithreaded applications. most applications are not. what exactly do you plan to use it for?
I plan to use it for video editing, music ripping, office applicaitions etc. I am leaning towards getting the i7 930 and the Asus P6X58D Premium Mobo. Have I gone stupidly overboard?
