Sttm wrote:I would wait till next gen, and I am. Not sure if I am going to end up going AMD again though.
I saw that post from Wind where he has the Sandybridge i7 quad core past 5ghz on air. Could Bulldozer really compete against a 6 core hyper threaded chip from Intel that overclocks past 5 ghz and is 20% more efficient clock per clock then the current i7s? I haven't bought Intel since my Pentium 4, but 5ghz!
Sandy bridge is quad core i7 max, come on. sandy is still 32nm like intels current westmere/gulftown hex cores, and do you really expect to pay less than $1k for any
newer architecture hex from intel?
(at least what we've seen, and sandy is still dual channel either way)
for a normal person who isn't selling their car to build a PC, thuban is a great architecture as it is, the lower end chips easily achieve 4GHz+ on air, and that's on 6 real cores. most games don't utilize HT, so multithreaded games(Badcompany 2, Dirt 2, AvP, Metro 2033) will run better on thuban than an i7 quad (ie BC2, that game hates running on quads, but loves the hex....at 3.9GHz
)
If I were you, I'd pick up a 1055 or maybe even 1075 or 1090, but when overclocking they both hit a similar heat wall around 4.1GHz bench stable (the 1090 is for people that run on stock clocks, or extreme overclockers generally, the architecture itself is the limiting factor for overclocking, around 4.1GHz due to heat production, well the 1090 can clock up to ~4.4 on good aircooling depending on the die # and week it's from. The 1090 also makes things easier for clocking for the IMC (memory controller: CPU-NB) and so you can keep RAM close to stock, but I prefer to underclock Memory and tighten timings...)
a 1055 at 3.9 or even 3.8 will wreck any game thrown at it, including Metro 2033 on DX11 and BFBC2 at max, it makes the GPU the bottleneck if you're midrange (I'd say a GTX 470 and up would make the 1055 the minor bottleneck)
(note: anything over 3.4Ghz is unstable with all 4 unlocked, so its not perfect)