Sandy Bridge? Or Haswell? Or Ivy Bridge?
Posted: Sat Jan 08, 2011 1:15 am
by pcgeek86
I was thinking about picking up a Sandy Bridge i7-2600k on Sunday when they're released, because I'm impressed with the performance and price of the processors. That said, I can't necessarily justify an upgrade at this point ... I just wanted to get familiar with Sandy Bridge and run it through its paces. I'm also quite pleased to see that Asus is now converting over to using UEFI rather than legacy BIOS.
So, right now, I'm running a Core 2 Quad Q9300 with 8GB of DDR3, a 256GB Corsair Performance Series SSD, and an AMD Radeon 5850. My computer runs Windows 7 64-bit, games, multiple VMs on VMware Workstation, faster than I ever thought possible (except for the GPU which can never be fast enough). Does it make sense to upgrade to Sandy Bridge, or wait for the Haswell chipset? I have a feeling that Haswell will cost on par with the i7 Extreme Edition Gulftown processors, and I'm also not quite sure when they're planned to be released. All I know is that these features almost sound worth waiting for: up to 20MB of cache memory, 6 cores and 12 threads, triple channel memory bus, etc.
As far as timelines go, I'm a little confused. I am expecting that later this year, they will release the "Extreme Edition" Sandy Bridge chips, which I believe might be Haswell @ 22nm? Ivy Bridge is estimated to be released on Intel's tick-tock annual cycle, at CES 2012 next January, so I would assume that Haswell would be to Sandy Bridge, as Gulftown is to Yorkfield & Penryn.
What are your thoughts, folks? Does a Q9300 (Yorkfield @ 2.5Ghz x 4) warrant an upgrade to the i7-2600K Sandy Bridge?
Re: Sandy Bridge? Or Haswell? Or Ivy Bridge?
Posted: Sat Jan 08, 2011 1:22 am
by JustAnEngineer
pcgeek86 wrote:Does a Q9300 (Yorkfield @ 2.5Ghz x 4) warrant an upgrade to the i7-2600K Sandy Bridge?
If you're happy with your system's performance, then it always makes sense to wait. If you want/need faster performance, then next week would be a good time to upgrade.
I have very similar components to what you have. I am ready to upgrade.
My signature wrote:C2Q 9300,
GA-X48-DS4,
8GiB,
HD5850, 4x
0.64TB +
1TB,
Blu-ray,
X-Fi XG,
Antec P182,
S75CF,
3007WFP,
Avant Prime,
G7
Re: Sandy Bridge? Or Haswell? Or Ivy Bridge?
Posted: Sat Jan 08, 2011 1:57 am
by pcgeek86
That's good advice. I am still debating whether or not to wait, but the price of $279 at Microcenter for the i7-2600K is very tempting, especially given how its performance compares to the Gulftown i7-980x Extreme Edition.
I don't really do enough CPU-intensive work, so I might just stick with my Q9300. Honestly, the Q9300 is a pretty impressive CPU ... I almost never have slow-downs due to any component of my system, including the solid state drive
Re: Sandy Bridge? Or Haswell? Or Ivy Bridge?
Posted: Sat Jan 08, 2011 2:47 am
by pcgeek86
Something else to consider is that I don't really have too many overclocking options with my Q9300. Obtaining an i7-2600k would allow me to run the CPU cores at clock speeds in excess of 4Ghz on nothing more than a simple HSF setup, including the stock HSF. That makes Sandy Bridge an even higher value proposition, but then again, I don't know that I necessarily want to deal with the hassles of overclocking. I suppose I've been turned off of it before because o/c'ing locked CPUs (like my Q9300) requires stressing the memory, PCI-E bus, and so on, as well.
Just talking to myself ...
Edit: Another benefit of the new Sandy Bridge-E chips (see link below) is that it will support higher amounts of memory through more RAM slots. The first iteration of Sandy Bridge chips are limited to 4 RAM slots (something to do with the limitation of two memory channels?) according to the Sandy Bridge architecture page on Wikipedia.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4083/the- ... 0-tested/6
Re: Sandy Bridge? Or Haswell? Or Ivy Bridge?
Posted: Sat Jan 08, 2011 4:10 am
by Althernai
pcgeek86 wrote:As far as timelines go, I'm a little confused. I am expecting that later this year, they will release the "Extreme Edition" Sandy Bridge chips, which I believe might be Haswell @ 22nm? Ivy Bridge is estimated to be released on Intel's tick-tock annual cycle, at CES 2012 next January, so I would assume that Haswell would be to Sandy Bridge, as Gulftown is to Yorkfield & Penryn.
You misunderstand: Sandy Bridge-E is not Haswell. Sandy Bridge-E is the pricey, high-end version of Sandy Bridge and it will indeed come out in Q3 2011. It will have more cores, more memory etc. etc., but the architecture will be more or less the same. After that comes Ivy Bridge in 2012 (or maybe at the end of 2011 if AMD manages to get something decent enough out to make Intel change their schedule) which is the 22nm die shrink of Sandy Bridge. Haswell is the new architecture
after Ivy Bridge. It is not scheduled until 2013.
What are your thoughts, folks? Does a Q9300 (Yorkfield @ 2.5Ghz x 4) warrant an upgrade to the i7-2600K Sandy Bridge?
If it's not broken, don't fix it. It doesn't make sense to upgrade unless your current part is limiting you in some way because there's always something better just around the corner (Bulldozer most likely in Q2 2011, then Sandy Bridge-E in Q3 2011, then Ivy Bridge). Sandy Bridge is a great laptop part because laptops are inevitably limited by battery life and SB is very good at this, but for a quad-core desktop it only makes sense to upgrade if you do something that pushes your Q9300 to the limit -- and in practice this means some sort of professional work because there are no games out that will be noticeably bottlenecked by the Q9300.
Re: Sandy Bridge? Or Haswell? Or Ivy Bridge?
Posted: Sat Jan 08, 2011 8:36 am
by JustAnEngineer
pcgeek86 wrote:Something else to consider is that I don't really have too many overclocking options with my Q9300.
Why not? A 20% bump to 3.0 GHz isn't too hard with this processor.
Re: Sandy Bridge? Or Haswell? Or Ivy Bridge?
Posted: Mon Jan 24, 2011 7:39 pm
by mganai
I say wait. With a Core 2 Quad you should still be good for a little bit.
Within a year, both SB-E and Ivy Bridge will hit, and you'll have even stronger options.