Sandy Bridges are coming :)

[PokemonCraft]

Sandy Bridges are coming

 

i am going to buy core i7 2600k

 

they can make easly 4.5 GHZ on air cooler

 

but i am planning to use that cpu at 5.5 GHZ with water cooling

[Nolan]

Sandy Bridge is pretty damn impressive, Intel has finally seen the way of having a top CPU at modest affordable price. It's actually very similar to what AMD did with their GPUs, except that Intel wasn't on the losing side of market share.

 

Here's hoping Bulldozer delivers.

[PokemonCraft]

Sandy Bridge is pretty damn impressive, Intel has finally seen the way of having a top CPU at modest affordable price. It's actually very similar to what AMD did with their GPUs, except that Intel wasn't on the losing side of market share.

 

Here's hoping Bulldozer delivers.

 

well sandy bridges will rule definitely

 

i hope i can reach 5.5 GHZ with water cooling

[McPhee]

It's impressive, but motherboard prices and the lack of Quickscan on the enthusiast boards have taken the shine off things somewhat. Still tempting though, should be a huge upgrade from an E5200!

[Caris]

Do we really need faster CPU's at the minute? Core 2 Duo's let alone i5's still scream.

 

Hard Drives are the real bottleneck at this point in time.

[Nolan]

Do we really need faster CPU's at the minute? Core 2 Duo's let alone i5's still scream.

 

Hard Drives are the real bottleneck at this point in time.

 

SSDs are getting faster though. Now if only they'd get cheaper.

[Caris]

Oh yeah SSD's are sweet, they're just out of most peoples price ranges.

[Shorty]

They are getting cheaper though. I picked up a small capacity vertex last year, lightning fast, for under £80. Since then prices have come way down.

[Nolan]

I actually just got the Seagate Momentus XT which is a hybrid drive incorporating 4GB of read only flash in it. It intelligently determines my most used whatever and speeds those up.

 

Mostly it just sped up my boot time by a good margin.

[Shorty]

Sandy Bridge recalled

 

(sorry, Daft)

 

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/364867/intel-recall-affects-all-sandy-bridge-pcs

[Ten10]

Yup sandy bridges are faulty. Couldn't stand the incoming tide.

 

Yeah that was a really bad pun

[Daft]

Yeah, saw that. Really thrown a spanner in the works. I need to edit together a video for uni...gonna have to try and borrow a computer now.

 

Might just cancel my order.

 

I called up PCSpecialist and they said it would take about 8 weeks. I'm assuming that's a conservative estimate.

[McPhee]

Intel have to manufacture new chipsets and ship them off to the motherboard manufacturers, who then have to manufacture new motherboards and ship them out to retail. PC Specialist then have to build your PC. I'd say a conservative estimate, yeah, though I bet you're near the top of the queue for their stock so they might manage it.

 

It's a load of utter wank. Hopefully Bulldozer hits the market soon (and works).

[Pyxis]

*waits anxiously for bulldozer* Hopefully it wont hit similar problems.

[Nolan]

Well that's utter shit....sorry to have recommend Sandy Bridge to you Daft.

[Daft]

Worry not! It's not like it's your fault...ooooorrr is it?

 

Seriously, though, it's (really) annoying but it's just a computer/thing. It's not the worst thing ever. Just need to sort out what I'm going to do.

[Daft]

I posed this on the Other Board, sorry for the double post but thought it would be good to get as many people to help me with this.

 

So I've been given some options with regard to my PC order,

 

A) We can put your order on hold for when the new motherboards are

delivered to us, and assemble/re-assemble your computer then. Current

estimations of delivery dates for the new stock are towards the end of

March/start of April.

 

B) You can cancel your order and receive a full refund, or

alternatively order a different computer, for example an i7-950 based

system or an AMD based system.

 

C) We will dispatch your order to you at your request. Your computer

will still have full warranty cover but you will forfeit the right to

have the motherboard replaced because of this issue. Any other

problems will of course be covered under warranty.

 

D) We can install (free of charge) a 2 port SATA 3GB/s PCI/PCI-E card

which you can use to connect your optical drives and/or hard drives

to. The only downside to this is the loss of a free PCI/PCI-E slot.

 

 

D is looking pretty juicy since I'm an impatient fop (although asking to wait about 3 months is slightly beyond the realm of impatient). BUT...it doesn't

sound like that bad a compromise so I'm wondering why this solution

isn't being offered more...i.e. Is there a downside that I'm not

understanding?

 

Also, in the email I got from PCSpecialist,

 

"The issue affects up to 4 of the SATA 3GB/s ports on your motherboard

(SATA 6GB/s ports are not affected), and may cause the ports to

degrade or even stop working after several months (possibly years) of

use. Your SATA ports are listed as 0 - 5 and this issue only effects

ports 2, 3, 4 and 5.

 

Because the total number of SATA 3GB/s hard drives and CD/DVD/Blu-ray

drives you have ordered is 2, your order is not directly affected by

this issue and therefore your computer will operate perfectly normal.

However the issue will still remain on your motherboard and if you

were to add additional hard drives or CD/DVD/Blu-ray drives in the

future, your motherboard may not recognise these drives or they may

operate slower than expected."

 

 

So my current set up would be fine. But if there are issues adding

stuff might be a problem. Not sure I would add anything, though.

 

So....A,B,C or D?

[Nolan]

B, C, or D. A is a pretty shitty option.

 

If you plan on getting more drives go with C or D, so long as you don't have plans for the slot that may be used. If you go C and add drives later on you can also always upgrade the motherboard as well.....though typing that I remembered that you didn't even want to build it yourself so that's not entirely viable.

 

With D the only thing I can really think of that would be an issue is you lose a slot, and I'm not sure that you'll get the full SATA bandwidth through whichever slot they use. PCI is rather quite slow, but if they use PCI-E it should be fine I think.

 

 

On that note why would SATA connectors even come on a PCI interface...

[Daft]

Okay...I understood about half of that. (I am a n00b)

 

I'm 99% sure I'm not going to add any other drives.

 

Also, I suspect they'll use the PCI-E because the PCI slot is being take up by the wireless card.

 

I'm leaning towards D heavily.

 

My brother said that upgrading graphics cards in the future might be an issue because some graphics cards take two PCI slots. I don't know if this is true or if he's getting confused. Any ideas?

[Nolan]

Your brother is right, it's becoming more and more common for cards to be extra wide and take up two slots. I'm pretty sure that's what your card is anyways though, so it shouldn't pose a problem if PCspecialist can get everything in there.

[Daft]

Cool, sounds promising. I think I might just go for it and option D it.

 

Edit: Done. Worse comes to worse and I want another HDD I'll just get rid of the CD Drive. I never use them.

 

There's probably nothing wrong with the motherboard anyway, the fault rate is 10%.

Edited February 2, 2011 by Daft

[McPhee]

Still got room for another two drives anyway, the two SATA III 6Gbps connectors are perfectly fine. The problem only affects SATA II. You can always install a different SATA card with more ports if you even need more that four (highly unlikely given the price of 2TB drives these days, £60!).

 

I think one of my SATA ports has failed. Been having problems with my computer all afternoon, then it wouldn't boot, tried all sorts and wound up reinstalling Windows (which took forever, far longer than normal). It still wouldn't boot. Then it wouldn't POST. Switched the SSD to a different SATA port and suddenly... IT LIVES! Odd, I thought it was supposed to take rougly 3 years of regular use to kill them? It took Intel months of high-stress, high-temperature testing to kill some boards but mine has failed within weeks? Ever feel like your being lied to?

[Nintendohnut]

So I'm using one of the new 15" MacBook Pros with a Quad Core i7 Sandy Bridge... and it's sickeningly fast. Will be running benchmarks on it on Monday at work but it's goddam impressive. Shame no SSD in this mother but it doesn't cause any problems. The chips were explained to me in layman's terms too so I kind of see how they made them faster. It worked.

 

On another note, haven't tried the Thunderbolt port yet, although during the Apple demo a 5GB file transferred in around 3 seconds, which isn't bad! Just going to have to wait for some tech to go on sale before testing can happen, but it's very exciting. And copper too - no optical! Don't know how it works at all.

 

The only bad thing is that this will have to go back in a few weeks time