[Kuchiyose]

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct....&subcat=793
My goodness thats.... bloody expensive? Is it even worth that amount of cash?

[Toasty]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...&Tpk=QX9775

Apparently.

Itanium 2's are more expensive though, but holy crap. This thing has some good specs. And apparently it's easy to OC as well. But the Skulltrail board is bull. It's not worth the massive pile of cash needed to build a system with that board and these CPU's unless you're doing number crunching related apps, because the skulltrail uses FBDIMM's instead of unbuffered DIMM's. FBDIMM's aren't all that great for gaming. Picture editing, high def video conversion, sure, but not 3D applications.

Anyway, I'd definately buy this if I had the cash. :P

[Kuchiyose]

Quote

Itanium 2's are more expensive though, but holy crap. This thing has some good specs. And apparently it's easy to OC as well. But the Skulltrail board is bull. It's not worth the massive pile of cash needed to build a system with that board and these CPU's unless you're doing number crunching related apps, because the skulltrail uses FBDIMM's instead of unbuffered DIMM's. FBDIMM's aren't all that great for gaming. Picture editing, high def video conversion, sure, but not 3D applications.

Anyway, I'd definately buy this if I had the cash.

Yeah it explains why there is two cpu sockets, its a shame its not built for gaming would be a beast , I would definitely buy it if i had the cash XD Its around £ 411 (including vat) and then you add the cpu, so its well over £1000. Well i think there is a similar board (I could be wrong) Its on the Apple Mac Pro, thats an 8 Core machine with Intel Xeon, would you say that would be better? I think I would buy the Macpro than this but the cpu is very tempting :S

[Toasty]

The Mac Pro G5 is an awesome machine. I've never had the chance to use one, but the fact that it uses dual quad core Xeons is something. I don't know what the Northbridge chipset is, or what kind of RAM it uses (more than likely Mac RAM, but then again, this uses a x86/64 architecture, not a Power PC architecture, so I don't know), but it's got some serious horsepower, and can hold up to 4.5 Terrabytes of data. Plus, you can also install XP or Vista on it instead, or alongside, Mac OS X Leopard. It's crazy expensive though. A standard configuration is ok, but it runs around $2k, and a completely outfitted system (dual quads running at 3Ghz, quad Crossfire, SATA controller card, etc.) runs anywhere between $10k to $20k.

Expensive, but definately the top candidate for ultimate multimedia machine.

On a side note, I ran around NewEgg throwing parts into a wish list to make an awesome machine (that I wasn't anywhere near being able to buy :joy:), but it got deleted for some reason. But it had the Q9770 Yorkfield CPU, an Asus Striker motherboard, dual GeForce 9800GX2's, an X-Fi Fatal1ty sound card, 4 750GB hard drives, two 64GB solid state drives, 8GB of DDR3 RAM, and liquid cooling for the CPU, Northbridge, and hard drives.

It ran about $9k.

[Max]

The reality is that you can get slightly less performance for a ton less cash, so those ultra high end parts are really just made for bragging rights for Intel. Just wait for the trickle down and get the cheaper versions, and you'll be happy enough.

[Toasty]

Yeah, that's why I've been hoping to get a Cedar Mill P4 for about $65. It's only a single core, but it supports 64bit instructions, and hyperthreading. So it's almost like having a dual core running at 3GHz. Besides, I don't have the cash to buy a dual core that runs faster than 2GHz and isn't a Celeron.

[Kuchiyose]

Dual core or single core, if you have a strong single core it doesn't really matter if you have a dual core or not but isn't quad cores slowly coming into the market now? But some of them are expensive and intel's are more expensive than AMD but AMD are just as good. But if your looking at Intel's then AMD IS out of the question since they can't run on intel's motherboards and vice versa.

[Max]

Toasty, even a 2GHz C2D will outpace that 3Ghz P4 at most tasks, so I'm not sure what kind of "value" you are going after. And the HT on the P4's isn't particularly great, certainly not equal to a dual-core C2D. But I recognize that cash is a concern, and in that case, a P4 is a decent compromise (though I'd consider looking at some A64 BE if you don't have the motherboard already).

[Atrius]

I recently upgraded from a 2.21 Ghz single core processor to a 2 Ghz dual core processor, and from benchmarks I've done it's roughly 180% the speed of the old processor. Even without the speed boost having 2 cores is a very nice upgrade anyway, no matter how fast a single core processor is it just can't give some of the benefits having multiple cores does.

Most programs while loading, or doing heavy calculations tend to max out the core they're running on. On a single core processor all of your other programs are going to run pretty slow when that happens, but on a multi-core system they'll get swapped to one of the other cores and be able to run perfectly fine. Even programs that are written use all available processor cores to perform heavy calculations don't seem to strain everything else as much.

[Toasty]

Max, on Apr 13 2008, 09:15 AM, said:

Toasty, even a 2GHz C2D will outpace that 3Ghz P4 at most tasks, so I'm not sure what kind of "value" you are going after. And the HT on the P4's isn't particularly great, certainly not equal to a dual-core C2D. But I recognize that cash is a concern, and in that case, a P4 is a decent compromise (though I'd consider looking at some A64 BE if you don't have the motherboard already).

Cash is the main concern, which is why I can't afford the C2D (I haven't seen anything I thought was worth getting that was below $100)

Anyway, I can't really afford to build a new PC right now. However, I had a socket 478 P4 that runs at 2.8 GHz, but the socket adapter (423 to 478) that I got so I could use it in my old Dell, doesn't work. I didn't want to have to sell my RDRAM and buy DDR, so I found a $35 intel board which I have with me right now. I'm waiting on the new PSU at the moment.

But since I can sell all four of my 256MB sticks of RDRAM for about $140 on ebay, I'm half slapping myself accross the face for not getting a DDR compatible board. I went over to intel's website to look at the chipsets, and the Intel 875P or 865PE Northbridges seem to be a good choices for the CPU I have. I realise that they're old chipsets and that the P35 or X48 chipsets are a lot better, but if I can get a board with an i850 chipset (the one I have now that's not being used yet) for $35, I'd imagine I can get one with the 875P/865PE chipset for a similar price.

The only problem is, is that they're hard as hell to find. D: Any suggestions?

[Kuchiyose]

Try Overclockers, they usually have amazing equipment from old to new.

http://www.overclockers.com/

[Toasty]

I found a good ASUS motherboard on ebay that even comes with a 3.2GHz P4.

Bidding ends in 2 days, and it's at 32 dollars.

There's also a handful of nice LGA775 boards for relatively cheap prices.