i7-960... 8 cores???
 

Hi all,

My sister just had a new machine built on a Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R board with an i7-960 3.2GHz, 8MB Cache, 1066MHz FSB, Quad Core processor.

Sure enough though, in both device manager and task manager.... there are 8 cores listed.

What the?

Can someone explain?

Hey John, that is HyperThreading.

Really? Wow!

It's good too!

Her 4 real and 4 virtual cores out-perform my 8 real cores on my Xeons by miles on the PPBM.

I am so jealous...

If you are already jealous, by all means don't overclock that 960! It might make you cry. The i7 is a great CPU.

But wait...she might upgrade to 6 cores plus 6 virtual cores total of 12 processors!!!!!

I guess that's the nature of technology. You buy it when you need it, use it, upgrade when you can afford to. My one consoling thought is thy given that I'm using a Supermicro board with Xeon CPUs I figure it's designed to last for twice as long as a regular board and CPUs. Am I right or just thinking wishfully?

Exactly what I thought - but my Supermicro dual Xeon is thrashed by a simple overclocked 920 i7 running at 4ghz -

Paul :-(

The latest incarnation of the Xeons are the same as the i7's and with the new evga dual 1366 motherboard coming out soon, you can overclock them to have dual six cores running at 4.0ghz+ with 24 threads.

*drool*

That's all good and well but they won't fit my 771 motherboard (which, by the way, cost more on its own that half of what my sister's entire i7 system cost to have built).

That's why I suppose I just have to accept that that's the story with technology. You buy it Monday, by Friday you'll wish you'd waited a little longer.

And yes, I am drooling...

That's the only problem. You cant even use the same ram.

Sometimes it's best to stay one step behind technology so you always know where to go afterwards.

Evga classified sr-2
 

You may want to check the evga site there are post with photo's of the SR-2 Board in varoius levels of
build! Havn't gotten mine yet!

Thats the board I'm on about. You can't buy it in th UK yet

Sounds tempting ... BUT ... you better have one heck of a massive cooling system (preferably water) because that puppy is going to generate massive amounts of heat. Here is the system I built this weekend with a Core i7 930:

Case: Antec 1200
Power Supply: BFG 1200 watts
Processor: Core i7 930
Mobo: Gigabyte: EX58 UD-5
HD: Four (4) WD Caviar Black 1 TB 64mb cache
Lite-On DVD/CD Drive (dual layer
Ram: Corsair 12 GB DDR3 PC3-12800 1600Mhz
Video: Zotac nVidia GTX 285
Cooling: Noctua NH D14

I easily overclocked it to to 3.85, and it is running stable on Windows 7 Pro with low temps. Overclocking is sort of a "black-art." Part science - Part art. In playing around with the Bios, I easily got to 4.0Ghz. However, as you increase the voltage to the processor, the temps. go up and you could be facing long-term reliability issues. It is somewhat of a balancing act: You want performance + stability + longevity.

Why are they even still making Xeons if the i7s are out performing them or the same as them? What\'s the advantage of a Xeon over an i7?

You would have to have a water cooling system but you might be ok if you have lots of fans and something like Corsir H50\'s.

Xeons are meant for dual cpu configurations. At stock, dual xeons will surpass the i7\'s but and overclocked i7 will surpass with applications which work apllications which don\'t take advantage of the extra threads.

The new EVGA board offers overclocking, something left out of the standard xeons boards, which means that the xeon will perform the best.

i7 chips have one QPI bus which means that they can only run in a single cpu configuration.