Quad core

[Daston]

Hey guys

any idea when the AMD quad core is coming out for nomal Desktop PC's?

Been looking at intel......shoot me now! I have never liked intel because of their marketing methods but this chip seems to be very good and AMD are falling behind.

Intel Core 2 Quad Extreme Edition QX6850 "LGA775 Kentsfield" 3.00GHz (1333FSB) - Retail

Asus Blitz Extreme Intel P35 (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR3 Motherboard

However it would mean I would have to get DDR3 RAM as well

[Samuknow]

That would be a smoking fast rig.

Is this to replace your current setup?

[Daston]

yeah it would be to upgrade my current rig, looking at DDR3 prices I would only be able to afford 2gb how would that compair with 4gb of DDR2?

[Samuknow]

It might be even due to the memory bandwidth increase.

[Daston]

cool any ideas on what prices I would be looking at for my CPU, mem and MoBo?

[Samuknow]

Retail box on the CPU goes for 400.00 US on Newegg. 150.00 OEM. Not sure why the differnece in price.

The board runs 230.00 new.

Mem 320.00 new for 4 GB.

So that is what they go for new. Knock off a few % and see what happens. You can always drop the price.

[Daston]

yeah good point will have to wait till after xmas as my supra is having a lot of work done to it and xmas presents need to be bought.

[ccperf721p]

AMD will behind Intel in terms of performance until they get yields good enough to get the clock speeds up to 3ghz. My best guess on this will be early next year.

I have a hard time recommending DDR3 at this time, getting a 4% increase in actual performance and having half the memory doesn't do it for me. DDR2 is cheap right now, DDR3 and boards that will run it are very high dollar, this will change as DDR2 is phased out. Prices of DDR2 will shoot up just like DDR1 did and DDR3 will drop making the move to DDR3 just about free.

I don't feel so bad about buying Intel after following AMD's marketing practices the last 6 months. They are taking pages right out of Intel's book..

[Samuknow]

Good point.

I have been looking at Intel as well. It will be some time before I can upgrade. I will see what it looks like then.

You have a fast system now. You should be able to wait it out to see what happens.

[Wolf2000me]

Daston,

I'd say your current system is great and indeed when X-mas comes you'll have a better idea of the market.

Somewhere in November we can also expect a price and technology battle from Nvidia and AMD with brand new graphic cards. Both seem to be on par technology and performance wise.

By that time availability and overclockability of both Barcelona and Penryn will also be more clear. With current generation of chips it's quite the important factor in a choice as they've never been more overclocking friendly.

In the performance department concerning memory sizes that's pretty easy. 4gb vs 2gb of system memory won't yield you anything at this point. It might even perform worse with more memory due to the longer address lenghts and looser memory timings.
No way should you look at DDR3 at this time. Performance vs DDR2 is worse due to higher latency timings and it's more expensive.

And of course when buying a new CPU you should not buy anything with less than 4 cores.