And you think people REALLY need some of the quad-cores today?

No.

You don't upgrade your gaming PC to just "work ok". You always go all out with the highest you can get (or at least smart people do that instead of buying a new PC every year or two).

My PC is way higher than what i "need". But im a speed freak so i simply want it.

Um, which i7?  and which Phenom II?   As I read it, the 6 core opteron is 34% faster than the Phenom II 940... the 955 had not yet been released at time of writing. So, if benchmarked against the 955, the 6 core Opteron may indeed be closer to the i7 920 than we realise.

I'm no expert and I don't read up on every CPU's development or release, but I do know this, while not as fast as equivelent Intels, AMD CPU's are value for money and are reliable and sturdy... and for the average joe with not a lot of money, they certainly fill a place in the market that's needed.  Without competition, God knows how much higher Intel prices would be right now.... thank God for AMD.

Um, the article stated that the 6 core Opteron IS being shipped to OEM's now... it's only the 12 and 16 cores that are slated for 2011 - 2012... and being first of its kind, who knows where AMD will end up taking the 6 core.  So in fact, AMD have siezed the initiative this time, and Intel may yet find itself having to run for its money.

Maybe????  But then AMD's CPU side of things has struggled some since it acquired ATI... which by the way, is currently leading the way in GPU techology/development, so maybe that miracle isn't so far around the corner after all.

Forever the optimist, me.

Pros and cons there Fuzzy - but I hear of a cheaper priced i7 920 in the making for those LGA1156 socket. Seems though they will be low power and very good for many of the smaller systems. Which I was and/or am hoping for in the X58 le micro board from EVGA. But I'm not getting my hopes up too much.

You know the funny thing about that board and a few of those other LGA1156 boards I've seen is they have no bio batteries! Actually I did not even see a bio chip either - kind of makes me think what the hell is this gona do and how you gona setup that thing. Oh ya those boards are 64 bit only  for the most of them. Oh there are a few that are both x64 and x86. But with no bio and if that is the case... no battery maybe... then I guess it would be a bio chip that is linked for direct control via the OS???

I'm flurried on this topic for those new i7 micro boards. Oh ya and get this - it does support sli and/or crossfire setup with 2 pci 2x16 slots. Also unlike the other new X58 boards with two eight pin power connections - it only needs one eight pin power plug.

I really want to get one of those micro boards and put that bugger in a larger as ever case - like a full atx tower- then add some killer cooling features for cpu, graphics and for sure the case itself with filters for dust and all.

I figure with the money I save buying micro and low power. To add it to the cooling and other features like solid state hard drives and such.

Just an idea that has been bugging the stuff out of me here lately and I'll not be happy till those guys finish with the testing and release that new hardware.

Like come on I can't wait!

Starkers > Most of what you said is true. I posted the benchmarks for the 34%, feel free to go look at em. I am not sure what you refer to when you say AMD is more budget than Intel, they have plenty decent processors for cheap. As a previous poster mentioned, there is no way in a sane person can you call any quad core budget. Dual cores are the standard these days and the Intel E1400 is a great example. It is 2GHz wich is decent, but can easily be overclocked to 2.4 or 2.8 on a aftermarket air cooler. It only costs $49 wow, thats budget there. 

Here is my major issue with your reply Starkers

Ever since AMD aquiced ATI, it has been down hill for them. They use to compete with nvidia, now they have been reduced to budget cards just like AMD's are budget CPU's. Nvidia has held the fastest GPU for pretty consistantly ever since AMD aqcuired ATI. Also Nvidia is pinoneering the way with CUDA projects. Video encoding, graphic design, scientific research, all accelerated by CUDA. One example is here: http://www.dvhardware.net/article27538.html But again, thats one example out of MANY.

Also Nvidia has acquied physx allowing gpu's to be used as physics processors, not some stupid specialized physics processor.

Recently nvidia released their GeForce 3D vision kit. It works phenominally and they were out before ATI.

Last year Nvidia held the largest graphics conference NVISION. THey had tons of professional seminars as well as vendors and sites for the everyday folks. They even went out of their way to cordinate with Videogames Live (the most awsome videogame concert series).

The glory days of the Radeon 9700Pro are over, not to sound like a borken record but AMD no where close to Nvidia. 

Lastly check out this article and you will see, the Phenom II performs slightly better than the Q6600, again a 2 year old chip.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/phenom-ii-940,2114.html

Starkers > You love AMD and thats fine. I hold no grudge against AMD. I favor the side who is push technology and currently it is not AMD.

I've already conceded that AMD/ATI have struggled since the merger... however, ATI has developed a DirectX 11 card with some pretty amazing clock speeds.  Don't recall exactly where I read this at present, but I do recall reading some benchmarks that suggested it wiped the floor with nvidia's GTX275.

Anyhow, that's beside the point, I actually run a Galaxy 9800GT nvidia card and am quite happy with it... the GTX275 would have been nice(r), but that would have been an extra $150 - $180 on top, and being that funds were limited to perform a PSU, CPU, GPU and RAM upgrade, it was well over my budget.

It's not so much that I love AMD, more that they are more affordable, at least here in Oz.  I would have liked to have gone with an i7 920, but that was $200 more than the Phenom II x4 920, and by the time I added the cost of new mobo and RAM as well as, I wasn't even on the same planet.  An i7 uprade would have cost in the vicinity of AUD S1500 - $1600... my Phenom II upgrade with PSU, GPU and an extras 2gb DDR2 800 RAM was less than half that.

Well there you go, while you say Intel has some budget prices on dual/quad cores, the Phenom II 920 was $45.00 cheaper than the Q6600 when I checked out pricings... and being that I would have had to buy a new mobo as well, the Phenom II was the obvious choice as it was compatible with the AM2 + socket mobo I already had.

So as you see, I did consider going with an Intel based upgrade, and I probably would have, had the cost not been so prohibitive at the time ... maybe next time around, when I7's and associated hardware come down in price a bit.

@themadmanazn you obviously have no idea what you're talking about. ATI competes fine with nvidia? Nvidia has the best card on the market right now, but the 4870x2 is $150 cheaper for a not very noticable difference. Crossfire works better then SLI (you can crossfire different cards, you can't with SLI.. and it seems to scale better as well, see: 4870 crossfire vs gtx 285 SLI)

Especially since the 48xx series, AMD has had far, far better price/performance then Nvidia. It's a joke, Nvidia's the one having problems keeping up with tech (they still don't have DX10.1 capable cards, while AMD have had them for over a year now)

AMD implemented GDDR5 first, another thing which Nvidia hasn't even caught up on a year later.

AMD were also the first out with 40nm cards in the 4770, while Nvidia are still delaying their 40nm cards. 

AMD has better price/performance then Intel when looking at Penryn processors vs Phenom II. Yes they have the Core i7, and if that's what you want then fine, but if your budget doesn't reach that far, then AMD's the way to go.

It's the same with AMD/Nvidia, Nvidia has the GTX 295, however anything lower then that and you'll find that AMD just has better price/performance, period. And with the extra $150 you don't spend on the GTX 295, you can buy a 4870/4850 to crossfire with and -outperform- it.

So stop talking out of your ass.

My point precisely!  And I wouldn't exactly call AMD processors 'budget' CPU's, either.  Budget can often imply cheap and nasty, and AMD put out quality CPU's that are sturdy and realiable at a more affordable price.

It's a fact that Intel has been the market leader for quite some time, and that, I think (others too), is what they use as leverage in their pricing policy to charge more for their products.  However, what is NOT reflected in Intel's pricing is the fact many of their products come from China, where they can exploit cheap labour to reduce production costs.  Funny thing, that, Intel customers are not see that being reflected in retail prices on 'new' CPU's being manufactured in Asia for considerably less than earlier (US built) models. 

A New Intel CPU seems to come out at the maximum price they think the market can bear, seeming to drop in price only when another model or three have replaced it.  In other words, the item comes down in price when (in computing terms) the market believes it is obsolete.  OK, this may be true of other companies, but market leaders tend to become so adept at it they forget the consumer and value for money... and Intel seems to be one of those companies.

While this may be true in the US, it's not necessarily so here in Oz!  For a start, ATI cards do not seem to be as popular here as Nvidia for some reason (supplier/retailer preference, I don't know) and can be harder to get... hence the prices can be much on a par with Nvidia cards.  When I was doing my upgrade recently, I did look into an ATI card and found that anything in the 47xx - 48xx series was above my budget... in the AUD $300 - $400's 

There were a few 46xx series cards within my price range, but I settled with a Galaxy 9800GT @ 1gb for $210 because it was still $30 - $40 cheaper and on a par with or better than the 512mb ATI cards available at the time... 2 of, to be precise.  So I guess it also depends on where you are at the time, supply and demand as to what you end up paying, though AMD CPU's seem to be quite popular here, and better priced than Intel equivelants, given we Aussies pay more than our US counterparts for anything PC related.

Woah really, the 4770 was over $300 AUD 0.o woah.

Yup, $309.95 at the time, best local price. Like I said, though, it comes down to popularity, supply and demand.  If an item for whatever reason isn't too popular/selling too well, suppliers tend not to buy in quantity to get bulk discounts, and thus we pay more as the register... ATI graphics cards, here,  seem to fall into that category recently.

In fact, my regular PC store doesn't stock ATI cards any more... Pat will get them in if specifically ordered, but they don't sell well enough for him to keep them, so-say, gathering dust.  The store I eventually got my upgrade parts from had only 2 ATI cards in stock, a 4670 for $269.95 and a 4770 for $309.95, yet there were several Nvidia cards from the GTX295 dating back to the 6800GS.

WOW, what a difference a month/6 weeks makes... that and/or I'm living in the wrong area.  I just checked on PriceSpy and prices have fallen dramatically... best price on a 4670 @ S109.00 and a 4770 @ $147.67 best price.  Shoot, even the Galaxy 9800 @ 1gb I ended up getting @ $210 is like $55.00 cheaper. Isn't it always the way.. buy something and a while later you see it cheaper elswhere. 

Thing is, a lot of the listed outlets with those ATI cards are interstate or non-local to me, so even if their prices were a 'little' cheaper than local ones at the time I was in the market for a new card, I don't know that I would have save much by the time $30-$50 was added for S&H. Still, I'm gobsmacked at the 'then' and 'now' price difference, though I'm thinking locality also plays a part in it, given I see so few ATI cards around here... then I suppose there's the profiteering greed factor of some traders to consider also.

I never said they weren't making money, I said they haven't had the fastest card ever since the 9700 Pro. As far as I can tell, Crossfire and SLI both scale terrible with the exception of a few minor games.

Regardless, anyone can make chips faster and cheaper, but Nvidia has done things outside that realm. Please do some research before trying to call me out. Notice how I post links for my claims.

Do you even know what these implications are? DDR5? 40nm? I don't think I am the one talking out of my ass. The fact that ATI has faster ram and smaller feature size means nothing since they are STILL getting out performed by older technology.

AMD currently only has one 40nm card out, and it's a midrange card. They have GDDR5 but a smaller bus size to keep costs down. They're profitable, and they aren't winning in performance, but Nvidia has -one- card up on them. It's not that big a deal. The fact that nvidia can't even get their own midrange 40nm/dx10.1 cards out is proof that their design isn't very scalable, while ATI is having no problems.

Oh, let's also get to mentioning. Sure, Nvidia is indeed the performance king, but let's not forget that Nvidia's cards are massive comparatively to ATI, and use far more power. http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3341&p=2

So yeah, Nvidia's winning, but a) only with one card, and technologically inferior designs that take far more power then ATI cards (See http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/hardware-canucks-reviews/9225-palit-radeon-hd-4870-x2-2gb-video-card-review-21.html)

So we can draw the conclusion here, that although nvidia are certainly (but barely) winning in performance, ATI is the leader of graphics -technology-, introducing the newest tech (55nm, 40nm, GDDR5, dx10.1) well before nvidia.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-geforce-price,2323-5.html

I can't find the original article, but they refer to it

"Nvidia's GeForce GTX 295 with SLI-on-a-card is the most powerful single graphics card on the planet. With two attached GeForce GTX 275 cards that have been merged, the GeForce GTX 295 offers very notable gains over the Radeon HD 4870 X2 in the great majority of game titles. Even more impressive is that it does so while consuming less power than ATI's flagship card, which is no small feat."

On top of that, if you are going top of the line, again power and heat are a non-issue. It is like, if I buy a Ferrari, do I care if it gets 5 miles per gallon? No, I care it looks awsome and goes screaming fast. If I cared about gas milage, I would buy a Prius.

And again, ATI fans, I am not saying they are a bad company. I own 3 ATI machines my self. I even own a AMD machine on top of that. However, if you look beyond gaming Nvidia is putting a lot of focus on GPGPU. Also many of you cite DX 10.1 or DX 11. THese are just silly API standards microsoft puts out. These are standards that Microsoft decides should be in their next graphics API. In general, there is very little if not no inovation here because before standards are adpoted, they are already pressent in current graphics technology.

Let me explain:

1. Fog is cool so graphics companies introduce special fog hardware

2. Microsoft decides it is a good idea and introduces a standard in the API

3. The hardware simple responds to that API call/command (like a function call)

4. Bam, you now support the fog function

As long as you satisfy all the functions, you are golden. Very little... innovation.

Now take a second and read what CUDA has done and I think you will have a better appreciation of Nvidia. I have had MANY first hand experiances. One of my classmates was a intern for the State of California Water managment and he accellerated the ground water model from takeing hours to seconds. Here are some published CUDA infrom from the Nvidia site.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_home.html#

Again, I by no means hate ATI or AMD. I simply think they are not doing anything spectacular.