i7 960

[Geforce255]

This looks like the "sweet spot" for a top performing chip to me. At 3.2 native, it should have plenty of overhead for overclocking.

My E8400 is getting a bit long in the tooth, I'm thinking this is a good replacement.

Any Sharks have an opinion on this?

I would put it on a ASUS P6T Deluxe V2 LGA 1366 mobo with CORSAIR DOMINATOR 6GB (3 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Triple Channel Kit Desktop Memory

[fluffmonster]

Seems like pretty sour value proposition. 920s D0 OC well and are half the money, and the difference is a good way towards a 120GB SSD.

[OS-Wiz]

seems like pretty sour value proposition. 920s d0 oc well and are half the money, and the difference is a good way towards a 120gb ssd.

+1

[Nater]

Poor value, unlikely to overclock significantly higher (if at all) than 920 chips. Intel's chips that are one bin down from the top (or the top bin where there is no Extreme Edition) are to be avoided. They offer a piss poor value proposition compared to CPUs that are another bin down and half the price.

That said, sometime this year (I really haven't heard when) they're going to bring forth a 930. It's in the roadmaps, but without a date. I really wish that intel would pull it's head out of it's *** and do 32nm quad cores on both LGA1366 and LGA1156. They're already going to do quad=core 32nm Xeons for LGA1366, it wouldn't be much of a stretch to do some Core i7s for single processor applications.

[Geforce255]

There is a German site claiming to get this over 5 gHz with Air Cooling, that's what caught my attention.

http://translate.google.de/translate...hl=de&ie=UTF-8

[fluffmonster]

Irrelevant...does not change the analysis one bit.

[Geforce255]

Irrelevant...does not change the analysis one bit.

If the overhead from base is the same as the i920, that means the potential is far greater on the 960.

I mean, if both chips can add 1gHz to their base, then the 960 still ends up the faster chip.

[Nater]

Most 920s can add a good bit more than 1GHz to their stock clocks, I've seen many in the 4-4.2GHz range. The 960, in most circumstances, isn't likely to gain as much clock speed as a 920. The real advantages would be the ability to get the same clocks with a lower bclock. Still not worth twice the money for an extra 200MHz.

5.0GHz on air is, and will continue to be, exceedingly rare regardless of the chip. That would be hard to do with a 965/975 and intel claims to reserve the best chips for those SKUs.

[fluffmonster]

yeah, that's not how binning works. Sometimes its just as simple (though uncommon) as binning a high-performing cpu down so as to maintain quantities consistent with price targets. Usually its performance and stability, but only at manufacturer recommended voltages. Thus, A 960 is usually more stable at stock volts than a 920 at the 960's speed, but we know that real headroom is also a function of voltage. It is better to think of a higher-binned cpu as one that "gets closer to the top" with a little more reliability than a lower-binned cpu rather than as one that is proportionally better in every way.

It will probably be easier to get a 960 to 4GHz than a 920 (statistically, that is). Is that really worth $300 though?

[RealBeast]

Another vote for the 920. The 960 is way too much $$ for any potential difference in OCing.

[kent1146]

If the overhead from base is the same as the i920, that means the potential is far greater on the 960.

I mean, if both chips can add 1gHz to their base, then the 960 still ends up the faster chip.

All of this is completely theoretical, until you actually get a physical chip in your hand to do testing. Any report, result, testing, etc done by other people can give you an indication of your own results. The most accurate information that you can get around the overclocking potential of a chip is the stepping of a particular model - but even that isn't a guarantee of your own results.

The only advantages I see to getting a 960 is that you have a higher guaranteed clock rate (the stock speed), and the *potential* for higher overclocks. But again, it isn't guaranteed.

Regardless, I don't think that the 960 is a wise investment. It is well beyond the point of diminishing returns when it comes to price/performance ratio. Buying a Core i7 920 for $290 + Intel X-25M 80GB SSD hard drive for $290 will cost you the same as a single Core i7 960 for $590 - except that you will get **ASTRONOMICALLY** better performance with the i7 920 + SSD than you would out of any clock rate bump from a i7 960.

[Geforce255]

It will probably be easier to get a 960 to 4GHz than a 920 (statistically, that is). Is that really worth $300 though?

To me it is, I'm not a starving student.

[kent1146]

To me it is, I'm not a starving student.

I think the point isn't whether you can afford $300 - I think that it is more relevant to the idea that you are well beyond the point of diminishing returns past the i7 920. Yes, you can spend $300 - but there are better bangs-for-your-buck for that $300 instead of maxing out your CPU.

[Geforce255]

I appreciate the advice from everyone.

SO how much improvement does an SSD really offer? The reviews are a bit confusing, showing that a couple of Raptors in RAID 0 are faster on reads than SSD's. Yet most here seem to prefer the SSD's

[kent1146]

I appreciate the advice from everyone.

SO how much improvement does an SSD really offer? The reviews are a bit confusing, showing that a couple of Raptors in RAID 0 are faster on reads than SSD's. Yet most here seem to prefer the SSD's

To give you an idea - You can spend $300 on a faster CPU that clocks a bit faster, and get a 0% - 5% practical improvement in your actual computing experience (not synthetic benchmarks).

Or you can spend $300 on an SSD, and experience load times that are 300% faster than what you have today. To give you an idea, I reduced my OS boot time (from after-POST to desktop) from 45 seconds on a Western Digital Raptor 74GB, to 15 seconds on an OCZ Vertex SSD. I *TRY* to choke the SSD by loading every app I have installed (20+ apps) all at the same time, and I can't do it. On an old mechanical hard drive, the drive would thrash for up to 70 seconds trying to load everything. An SSD is *DEFINITELY* worth it.

As for the benchmarks showing RAID-0 Raptors being faster than an SSD - I suspect that the benchmark is a synthetic benchmark, where they are showing either:

• Max burst transfer rates - essentially, reading data from the cache of the drive, rather than off of the mechanical platters, or
• Sequential reads of a large-file (100MB+).

In those conditions, I could see a RAID-0 Raptor array being faster. However, the number you should really look at to determine performance is Random 4KB reads. Almost every disk-read activity on your machine is going to be random reads of multiple non-sequential files that are no more than a few MB in size. In general, the higher the Random 4KB read speed, the faster the drive will actually perform in real-world situations. And when it comes to that speed, nothing can come even close to touching a fast SSD.