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I don't think GTX460s would be better. I haven't seen any benchmarks that suggest they outperform GTX570s in SLI, which means they can't possibly outperform the HD6990. But yeah, Intel has. When you went AMD, you either had to pick an nForce board or an AMD chipset board, so it has been either or but never both. Finally we have a unified solution. I don't like being stuck with just one company for my peripherals.


April is when Ivy Bridge hits us according to Intel's roadmap. I suspect we will see the usual industry-dominating performance and a hefty price tag to go with it.

I heard that some Ivy Bridge stuff may actually start late 2011, not sure if that's accurate at all though.

Naw. What you're thinking of is the E series Sandy Bridge. Supposedly similar performance, but on a larger process and not as many features on the motherboard chipsets.

Ah, yeah you're right.

The Sandy Bridge E series is supposed to be the replacements for the top-end "Extreme" series style CPU's right? IMO Extreme's were never worth the $1,000+ price tag just for unlocked multipliers, so these newer gen 2 Core i chips are awesome.

E-series will fill an approximate role to the 1366 i7s right now, including the Extreme. And you are right, nobody in their right mind would buy one of those Extreme CPUs. Even for bleeding edge. The performance of an i7 980X is barely above that of the i7 930. Just OC the cheaper part. It's easy and reliable and not at all risky for such a low level overclock.

I'm pretty sure that if I were to build right now I'd just buy an i7-2600k based system. If it's anything like the 2500k I just put together it would be wizard.

Yeah, I went there and said "wizard".

I don't think the performance gain over the original LGA1366 is worth it. We've progressed in efficiency, but the Nehalems overclock almost as well as the Sandy Bridge, and they have more useful features on desktop than Sandy Bridge. Dead socket? Maybe, but so is LGA1155.

But 1155 processors come in k variants that have unlocked cores.

So? Without an impractical setup, you aren't going to get appreciably higher clocks than you can with any old 1366 i7. 1366 also has the advantage of triple channel memory and more PCI Express lanes. QuickSync is irrelevant. Turbo cores is irrelevant.

Except triple-channel memory is only useful for preventing you from attaching most large CPU coolers. It doesn't give you any kind of performance boost, and it's dumb because it's TRIPLE channel as opposed to a multiple of two.