mapesdhs
Distinguished
- Jan 22, 2007
- 2,507
- 0
- 21,160
superkart,
It's a back & forth game. I started off with a 6000+, but the AM2 mbd I had (ASUS M2N32 WS Pro)
was not issued with a BIOS update to support the Ph2, so although you were able to upgrade, I
was not. This happened to a lot of people, on the Intel side aswell - various S775 boards that
can't use the 9K series CPUs. Very annoying as the board I had was a costly 'pro' series board
with proper PCIX. I had already transitioned once though, from an older AGP board (Asrock
AM2NF3-VSTA), so the 6000+ at least saw some extended life (old AGP gfx was X1950Pro, replaced
that with 8800GT). Before that I had a Dell 650, so even the X1950Pro was carried over once.
Anyway, so I built an i7 860 system, keeping my 8800GT. The speedup over the 6000+ was huge,
to put it mildly. Later I upgraded to an i7 870 with a higher clock. Since then I've built
many other systems, and upgraded the old Asrock to a Ph2 965 and 3850 AGP (for my gf); Asrock
had a different attitude to their older mbds, they released a BIOS update for Ph2 within minutes of
the 965 coming out. I have three Ph2 965s now, and lots of other CPUs/boards/combos (no Ph2 X6
yet though, still too costly 2nd-hand).
Despite being a quad-core, the 965 really isn't that fast in the grand scheme of things. Here's
a summary using some of my 3DMark06 CPU test numbers (except the oc'd 965/760 results which I
found on 3dmark.com). Of course this info says nothing about price/performance, but it's
interesting nonetheless. See:
http://www.sgidepot.co.uk/misc/3dmark06cpuscores.txt
Note that an oc'd 2-core i3 550 almost matches a stock 965, which is rather amusing; the former
is far better for some tasks (X3TC, ProE, etc.), ie. those that benefit from absolute high clock
rather than lots of cores. Chips like the 2700K are just the best of both worlds (that 5GHz took
me less than an hour to sort out; indeed, reaching 4.8 took 5 minutes).
More problematic for the 965 was how it didn't really do that well against the 760 in many tests,
especially given how high the 760 can be oc'd due to its lack of HT. I've not oc'd my 760 yet, I
want to experiment with the 670 first, see if I can get it past 5.0.
Ian.
It's a back & forth game. I started off with a 6000+, but the AM2 mbd I had (ASUS M2N32 WS Pro)
was not issued with a BIOS update to support the Ph2, so although you were able to upgrade, I
was not. This happened to a lot of people, on the Intel side aswell - various S775 boards that
can't use the 9K series CPUs. Very annoying as the board I had was a costly 'pro' series board
with proper PCIX. I had already transitioned once though, from an older AGP board (Asrock
AM2NF3-VSTA), so the 6000+ at least saw some extended life (old AGP gfx was X1950Pro, replaced
that with 8800GT). Before that I had a Dell 650, so even the X1950Pro was carried over once.
Anyway, so I built an i7 860 system, keeping my 8800GT. The speedup over the 6000+ was huge,
to put it mildly. Later I upgraded to an i7 870 with a higher clock. Since then I've built
many other systems, and upgraded the old Asrock to a Ph2 965 and 3850 AGP (for my gf); Asrock
had a different attitude to their older mbds, they released a BIOS update for Ph2 within minutes of
the 965 coming out. I have three Ph2 965s now, and lots of other CPUs/boards/combos (no Ph2 X6
yet though, still too costly 2nd-hand).
Despite being a quad-core, the 965 really isn't that fast in the grand scheme of things. Here's
a summary using some of my 3DMark06 CPU test numbers (except the oc'd 965/760 results which I
found on 3dmark.com). Of course this info says nothing about price/performance, but it's
interesting nonetheless. See:
http://www.sgidepot.co.uk/misc/3dmark06cpuscores.txt
Note that an oc'd 2-core i3 550 almost matches a stock 965, which is rather amusing; the former
is far better for some tasks (X3TC, ProE, etc.), ie. those that benefit from absolute high clock
rather than lots of cores. Chips like the 2700K are just the best of both worlds (that 5GHz took
me less than an hour to sort out; indeed, reaching 4.8 took 5 minutes).
More problematic for the 965 was how it didn't really do that well against the 760 in many tests,
especially given how high the 760 can be oc'd due to its lack of HT. I've not oc'd my 760 yet, I
want to experiment with the 670 first, see if I can get it past 5.0.
Ian.
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