Intel Lynnfield i5-750 & i7-870 Review Comment Thread

[kuddles]

Originally Posted by Chilly

Huh? Don't get me wrong P55 looks to be a nice platform, and at an ass kicking price, but it does have a brick wall thats easy to hit. X58 is still the superior platform, absolutely no reason to feel foolish as you are not, you got the better platform, and without the bottlenecks inherent to the LGA1156/P55 platform.

Oh, I don't really feel bad about it, I decided on going the 920 a long time ago, and between the smoother performance I'm already getting (which will only improve when I get an SSD for Win 7), the ability to crank up things like supersampling AA in every game without even thinking about it, and the apps I run being much faster I'm more than satisfied.

It's just a little funny that a busy schedule led to me not biting the bullet until the weekend before a worthy competitor was even released (a common trend with me), which at the very least might have made X58 prices drop a bit. Wouldn't want to change my decision for the world, just like to poke fun at myself (as my friends do) at my constant desire to always go beyond a "reasonable" price / performance ratio.

[geokilla]

Great review. If only I had the money to buy that NCIX bundle.

Here's a question for you folders out there. Would you purchase an i7 860 instead of i5 solely for HT if you were building a dedicated folding rig?

[matsta31]

Simple answer : yes. You can crunch on 8 thread instead of 4, you just double the work with HT.

[chrisk]

Originally Posted by geokilla

Great review. If only I had the money to buy that NCIX bundle.

Here's a question for you folders out there. Would you purchase an i7 860 instead of i5 solely for HT if you were building a dedicated folding rig?

Affirmative. As matsa mentioned, you can run 4 instances of the vmware client (each instance uses two logical cores).

HT is worth it to me. My computer is either folding or doing some encoding or video work, so I use it. You are also talking to a guy who bought two GTX285s for folding.

If I were a gamer first, folder second, HT might not be worth it, and I would spend the extra cash on a better video card (but again, perhaps the better video card would be a great folder too??)

[Chilly]

Originally Posted by geokilla

Great review. If only I had the money to buy that NCIX bundle.

Here's a question for you folders out there. Would you purchase an i7 860 instead of i5 solely for HT if you were building a dedicated folding rig?

Absolutely YES, when it comes to crunching/folding, the PPD increase with HT is quite staggering, 30-50%, sometimes more, over a similar CPU without HT enabled.