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Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 Sample Preview 146

Posted by Zonk from the core-tastic dept.
MojoKid writes "Intel took the wraps off a new Core 2 Duo desktop chip today, dubbed the E6750. Though this chip shares the same basic clock speed as the Core 2 Duo E6700 at 2.66GHz, this new processor also runs on a faster 1,333MHz Front Side Bus. The new chip's additional bus bandwidth affords it up to a 5% performance advantage over standard 1066MHz FSB-based Core 2 chips. However, what's perhaps more promising is this new chip's overclocking head-room of up to 3.92GH and beyond on standard air cooling."
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Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 Sample Preview More

Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 Sample Preview

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  • All on one page (Score:5, Informative)

    by edgr ( 781723 ) on Monday June 25, 2007 @03:21AM (#19633131)
    The link to the article all on one page is http://www.hothardware.com/printarticle.aspx?artic leid=989 [hothardware.com]

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by muszek ( 882567 )
      If you knew how much effort they put into creating those cute 11 pages, you wouldn't have rushed to destroy everything.

  • Good marketing? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 25, 2007 @03:21AM (#19633135)
    Why not just sell them rated at a higher clock speed? It would be funny to think they made a fast chip and purposefully rated it at a lower speed to grab some of the extra hobbiest market while simultaneously cutting down on support calls from overclockers who cause system instability by making the overclockers think they are overclocking. :)

    • Hi there! Let me introduce... (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      ...the ",". It's pronounced "comma", and comes in very handy sometimes.

      Thanks.

      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by Plutonite ( 999141 )
        When you are overclocking for 5% performance gains on synthetic benchmarks there is no time for commas.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Overclocking raise the heat and power consumption, and the most important, it lower the lifetime of the CPU. Intel have to guarantee that chips work a certain amount of years, this is not so important in the desktop world, but in the server space it is very important.

    • Re:Good marketing? (Score:5, Informative)

      by jawtheshark ( 198669 ) * <slashdot@nosPAm.jawtheshark.com> on Monday June 25, 2007 @04:04AM (#19633325) Homepage Journal

      Yes, it's all market related... but not how you think.

      There is no such thing as a xyz GHz chip. They are all the same (except for caches on chip and so, but let's neglect that) The chips are all made from the same wafers and then are tested: those that are tested at high speeds and work, get sold als "high speed chips", the chips that fail are tested at lower speed and then, if they work, sold for that speed.

      Now, that's fine in theory, the problem is that when the yields of high speed chips are very high. At that point Intel has a problem: their high-premium chips are plentiful and hence they should sell them at lower cost. Especially that they don't have lower speed chips that are for the middle and low-segment market. But wait! Why not just sell the chips that work at high speeds, but tell the customer that they are slower speed chips. The (average) customer will not test if it runs higher speeds, and frankly, it is not in their interest to do because they would lose warranty.

      That's what really happens...

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by operato ( 782224 )
        spot on and that doesn't only happen with cpu's. hard disks are the same too.
        • Yeah, but it's much more difficult to unlock a hard-disk...

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by level_headed_midwest ( 888889 )
          Yes and no. You are correct in that a two-platter 250 GB drive and a two-platter 320 GB drive likely use the same platters, with the 250 GB unit being "locked." But the hard drive manufacturer can and does vary the number of platters for differing capacities as well as putting in a different motor for different speeds. Intel generally has one set of dies for all of a certain arch of chip- the Core Duo, Core Solo, Pentium Dual Core, and Celeron M 400 series are made from the same mask. Even the Core 2 Duos a
      • By the way, that's called price discrimination. Flea market hawkers do the same: sell at the price that the buyer is ready to pay, thus maximizing their profit.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Kjella ( 173770 )
        Well, there's the sane overclockers and then there's the to-the-limit overclockers. I've read some rather interesting forum posts on how their overclocked chip was getting unstable, so they dropped it to stock speed and sold it. All the honor of selling a used car that'd been driven like hell as if your grandmother used to drive to church. I bet six months to a year later whichever sucker bought it will start experiencing the same instability because the overclocker burnt through 90% of the lifetime like a
        • And I got the impression that most people doing overclocking aren't clocking lowend parts to typical speeds for cash savings, they're the ones going for bragging rights and 3dmark points, which means clocks to the max. Reminds me a lot of the people who spend 80% of their time pimping out their ride and 20% driving it.

          I think your impression is quite the opposite of reality. Sure, there are some folks as you describe, but they are the vocal minority. Even when you look at the results of those enthusiast [hardforum.com]

          • And the biggest surge in overclcocking I recall were all the people running their 350Mhz celerons at 500Mhz... because the celerons were cheap.
            It was 366Mhz Celerons overclocked to 550Mhz. It wasn't only because they were cheap. Many (if not most) 366Mhz Celerons were able to OC to 550Mhz with just the stock cooler (bump the 66Mhz FSB to 100Mhz).

            Add in the famous Abit BP6 (dual Celerons) and you were in business.

            Oh, those were the good old days.
    • There is some risk that Intel's testing is catching a slow path that the overclocker isn't. Just because the overclocker's programs don't crash and his benchmark suite gives the right answers doesn't mean he has exercised the slow path. He might get the wrong answer only if he multiplies two particular numbers when overclocked, for example.

      This might be fine for gaming or photographs, but it's unacceptable if the exact answer is critical.

  • Mmm, yummy... Much better than just playing with the multiplier.

  • what... (Score:2, Funny)

    by cosmocain ( 1060326 )
    ....a coincidence: the overclocking article is from ->hothardware. yeah. i truly believe, that an ordinary aircooling and a C2D at 3.92GHz have really earned an article on a domain called like that.

  • Reviews of samples should stop talking about... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by heyguy ( 981995 ) on Monday June 25, 2007 @03:27AM (#19633169)
    overclockability. I believe those chips sent out for review are cherry picked by intel. Most of the reviews for the Core 2 Duo chips last year said the lower end chips could easily be overclocked to 3.5ghz+. That ended up not being the norm. I think something around 3ghz is pretty standard.
    • I'm overclocking an off the shelf Q6600 to 3Ghz with a Zalman air cooler and an Intel XBX2 board. Going just past that and things fall apart quickly.
      I assume the E6600 "extreme" part, with the changable multiplier, could easily go to three and a half.

      The 45mn parts are going to be much more fun.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by niceone ( 992278 ) *
      Reviews of samples should stop talking about overclockability

      Problem is, there isn't anything else interesting about this chip! The non-synthetic bechmarks are a couple of % up (or down in once case, but they say that's within the margin of error). Not that that's a criticism of thhe chip itself, they have to update their line.

  • Megahertz myth (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 25, 2007 @03:30AM (#19633181)
    I thought we had finally put the "megahertz myth" behind us. But no, here we are again cheering on Intel for producing chips with their many megahertzes and gigahertzes.

    We should lean on them to use a more sensible naming convention. AMD has led the way in this area. Consumers are much better served with descriptive product names such as, for example, "Turion 64 X2 TL56", rather than some arbitrary clock speed designations.

    • Re:Megahertz myth (Score:5, Insightful)

      by jawtheshark ( 198669 ) * <slashdot@nosPAm.jawtheshark.com> on Monday June 25, 2007 @04:12AM (#19633363) Homepage Journal

      Descriptive product names? You know what "Turion 64 X2 TL56" means? I don't.... That said, I don't know what "Core 2 Duo E6600" means either. Is a "Turion TL60" better than a "Turion TL56"? Or a "Core 2 Duo E6800" better than a "Core 2 Duo E6600"? Heck, it's like with graphic cards: you cannot say squat based on the names of graphics cards. It's all dust and mirrors.

      For the bad car analogy: is a BMW 318 better than a BMW 320? You're gonna say the BMW 320 is better, evidently! I might argue that the BMW 318 I was talking about is full option and that the BMW 320 doesn't even have power windows.

      Yeah, yeah, I know you're kidding... but really: the chip names of all manufacturers are pretty much a joke.

      • It's "smoke and mirrors", not "dust and mirrors".
        • He was actually referring to cocaine; the fact that visual inspection of a quantity of cocaine can tell you nothing of its actual content. This is analogous to the meaninglessness of processor designations. So the metaphor was appropriate.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by OverlordQ ( 264228 )
        You know what "Turion 64 X2 TL56" means?

        Turion - Series
        64 - 64-bit CPU
        X2 - Dual-Core
        TL - Taylor Core
        56 - Dunno.
      • Off topic, I know, but the geek in me loves to notice and dissect these things.

        With respect to BMW car naming conventions, the model number makes quite a bit of sense if you know how to break it down. The first number tells you which "series" the car belongs to (3 series, 5 series, etc). The second two numbers refer to engine displacement (25 is 2.5 liters). The trailing characters that are sometimes used refer to various options (i=inline engine, x=all wheel drive, etc). So if you were to ask me to dec

        • I knew all that. It's the reason I chose BMW, because I knew it's a series 3, 1.8l engine versus 2.0l engine. You have to give the Germans that: their car model numbers do make a lot of sense. Well, most of the time anyway ;-)

          However, you'll have to explain me this [www.bmw.de]. Both the 318 and the 320 are still in production (sure the i is there, but as you say it means "inline"... even though I though it stands for "injection"...)

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by hal2814 ( 725639 )
          So what size engine is in a 1985 325e? The same 2.7L engine that's in the 1985 528e. BMW is generally pretty close in its naming convention but it does fall apart under scrutiny, especially when minor engine revisions drive up the displacement. Personally, I'd take a 320 (old or new) since there's no way I'd ever own the piece of tin that is the 1.8L BMW 4-cylinder engine ever again.
          • I figured there would be some strange exceptions to the rule. Thanks for pointing that out :)

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by adolf ( 21054 )
            More exceptions:

            AFAICT, all of the E36 OBD-II (post-1996) 6-cylinder model descriptions are wrong.

            For whatever reason, stated power output for a given displacement went down somewhat with the change in engine management systems, and the model numbers changed accordingly although displacement actually stayed the same.

            For example, a 1995 325i has a 2.5l M50 engine, as expected. But in 1996, that model was dropped, and became the 323i, which was equipped with a 2.5 liter S50. 3-liter engines also suffered fr
        • Actually the video cards usually have regular increasing numbers for every new chipset revision. It's the asian OEMs like Asus, Gigabyte and others that totally mess it up. Like for example, Asus released a V9999 many years ago which had a Geforce 6800 Ultra at its heart. It was a fast card for sure, but where do you go after 9999 ? Is the EN8800GTX slower than the 9999 (No, it's not).

          It gets even dumber when truly unenlightened souls try to compare video cards by their onboard memory. I've lost count

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by niko9 ( 315647 )
        The 318 and 320 series BMW's has 1.8L and 2.0L liter engines respectively. 3 stood for 3 series, and the engine sizes followed. BMW 328 has a 2.8L engine. Quite simple if you ask me, and a hell of a lot easier to understand than CPU and graphic card specs.

        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMW_3_Series [wikipedia.org]

        p.s. I understood BMW's series naming scheme before I looked it up on Wikipedia.
    • This reminds me of an idea for processor model naming I heard somewhere. Why can't processor companies do what car companies do and release processor models once annually? Have only a few base models (Athlon for desktops, Turion for notebooks and Opteron for server) and make sure those names almost never change. Maybe even have a few "package" levels similar to how you can get a car with extra features but in this case have higher processor speeds, memory bandwidth, etc. that people who really care can look

      • Yeah, and then people will start replacing their machines because it's "old" even though the computer is in perfectly fine working order and fulfills the needs of the user. Guess, it's time to tell my wife that her 2003 P-IV needs replacing... ;-) Preferably with an iMac 2007 ;-)

        I'm not sure about cars, but the first time I heard about year-based car models, was when I talked with North Americans. I've never heard anyone in Europe refer to their car as a 2001 Golf. They'll say I have a Golf 3 (for exam

        • Ask a person on the street which one of these is a better: An Intel Core 2 Duo e6800 or an Intel Core 2 Duo t5600? Now no one will ask that question but if people come in to Best Buy and want a computer how in the world would they know the difference? I can't even tell you which one is better and probably 90% of the people on Slashdot would be the same way. I assume the e6800 but since there is a t7600 maybe the t series is always better?

          Most people don't even know where the number levels begin or end. t760
        • It doesn't just say how old the car is, it also says how young YOU are :) Seriously though, dating computers by their year of release would help a little bit. It would give the non-techies something easy to latch onto, instead of having people say "Pentium 4 ? you're trying to sell me old junk! I want a Pentium 64!"

          At least when you buy a used car, even a non-mechanic can figure out that a 2001 Ford Focus is a piece of shit... erm, and that it's 6 years old. If people advertised their PC as a "2004 AMD"

          • At least when you buy a used car, even a non-mechanic can figure out that a 2001 Ford Focus is a piece of shit...

            Why? Because it's a Ford, or because that it's 6 years old? I mean I drive a 7 year old Audi TT now... (Yes, you USies would call it a 2000 Audi TT, and that's the year I bought it.) I don't think it's a piece of shit and I'm most definitely not going to sell it.

            If people advertised their PC as a "2004 AMD" then you could derive that it's between 1.6 and 2.4ghz, probably has 256mb of ram

    • "I thought we had finally put the "megahertz myth" behind us."

      Do you even know what the Megahertz myth is? It's completely irrelevant in this context; we're talking about overclocking one architecture (from 2.66GHz to almost 4GHz), which means we should see a fairly nice scaling of the performance within these numbers (and if it's not 1:1, we should have a reason for it, such as drawbacks within the architecture itself).

      Now if we were talking about a 2.66GHz Intel chip in comparison to an X.XXXGHz AMD
  • This is like sex, except im having it!

  • Overclocking... (Score:2, Funny)

    by stox ( 131684 )
    the reason some people measure the MTBF of their systems in weeks instead of years.

    • Re:Overclocking... (Score:4, Informative)

      by commlinx ( 1068272 ) on Monday June 25, 2007 @03:59AM (#19633303) Homepage Journal
      Exactly, and why the chip is sold as 2.66GHz not the 3.92GHz that the marketing department would prefer. Semiconductor manufacturers do a stellar job of testing and specifying things over the complete operating range of the device. Ignoring obvious differences in things like ambient temperature and power supply fluctuations when you overclock a device you risk a number of factors for reliability. Any temperature measurement is always taken at a single point and if another point on the surface of the silicon is hotter, for example because your application of heatsink compound was not so great or it contains higher speed switching and more dense circuitry in that area you always run the risk of frying things. Not to mention there is a difference between running a game that might place peak demands on the CPU and allow it to cool versus compute-intensive applications where you might want to drive all cores at 100% over a long period. And they might be using a different section of the processor, and your CPU might be from a different batch, and...

  • Stability? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Great, so it's bloody fast. But can it complete 10+ hours of Prime95 and 32M digits of SuperPI without any errors? Simply booting and running a few benchmarks is hardly a means of stability testing.

  • "Up to 5%..." (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Flying pig ( 925874 ) on Monday June 25, 2007 @03:43AM (#19633247)
    Pay more for memory, reduce the error margin on the motherboard, all for a virtually unnoticeable improvement in performance. Someone is trying to cash in to pay for the development of versions that will consistently run at higher clock speeds. The processor companies are getting like the drug companies - hyping things that work hardly any better than the one before, and then seeking to profit from early adopters.

    Now what I would like to see advertised - but won't - is slower but highly reliable motherboards, processors and memory at commercial prices. How about a Core Duo Reliability Edition? I would reallyt like to be able to build a server and a few desktops from commodity hardware and almost be able to forget about them for 5 years. I can get HDDs that will do that, but where can I get the commodity silicon where the manufacturer will make a statement about long term reliability?

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by cowbutt ( 21077 )
      Now what I would like to see advertised - but won't - is slower but highly reliable motherboards, processors and memory at commercial prices. How about a Core Duo Reliability Edition? I would reallyt like to be able to build a server and a few desktops from commodity hardware and almost be able to forget about them for 5 years.

      Er, that's exactly why I stick with Intel CPUs on quality motherboards (Gigabyte/ASUS) that use Intel chipsets and Crucial memory, despite the taunting of my AMD fanboy friends. Als

      • I declare a special interest. At one time in my career I used to design industrial computers that had to run 24/7. It was possible than without much trouble to buy uprated components ("industrial" rather than "commercial" grade) and then run them with tight tolerances. The overall cost premium wasn't very great, in fact, around 20% of system cost.

        I've had no real problems with either AMD or Intel, but none of our recent boxes have been around long enough to be sure. What I would like to know is the likely

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by cowbutt ( 21077 )
          By the way, though I agree with you in general, as many fans as possible is not always a good idea. It makes a lot of difference where they are placed, and the thing you do not want to do is to create internal vortices.

          True; I was being a bit flippant. I aim to bring in cool at the front and bottom of a tower case, and exhaust warm air from the top of the back, hopefully resulting in forced convection to do as good a job as can be done without a thermal lab.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by ZwJGR ( 1014973 )
        "Quality motherboards" is the tricky bit in your post...
        I'm using an Asus motherboard (P5ND2-SLI) and the number of problems I've had is unbelievable.
        Firstly the power supply controller on the motherboard is faulty, so I have to short the power on pin on the ATX connector to ground with a paper clip to get any action at all.
        Then the Asus drivers totally screwed my Windows XP SP2 installation over, BSODs, freezing, no booting. Reinstall needed...
        Then I had to upgrade the BIOS to change the CPU fan speed...
        I

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by cowbutt ( 21077 )
          "Quality motherboards" is the tricky bit in your post...
          I'm using an Asus motherboard (P5ND2-SLI) and the number of problems I've had is unbelievable.

          Personally, I disqualify nVidia chipsets immediately, primarily due to the necessity to use their proprietary drivers, but secondarily because I've never had a problem with Intel chipsets supporting Intel CPUs, whereas I have had problems with AMD on SiS and VIA and Intel on UMC.

          Firstly the power supply controller on the motherboard is faulty, so I have

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by ZwJGR ( 1014973 )

            Why didn't you return it immediately for a refund? Behaviour like that strikes me as a clue that the design 'ain't right, or it isn't compatible with the PSU you've chosen
            I got it virtually for free, nearly new, from a friend who was having some other problem with the motherboard, forgot what it was. PSU is high quality and compatible.
            If I couldn't fix it for cheap, I was just going to buy a new one...
          • That's cyclic; I used to buy the best motherboard I could, and the cheapest CPU that would fit, in expectation of upgrading the CPU every year or so as prices fell. These days, increasingly, you seem to need a new chipset and memory to get the best from later CPUs, so I'd not place quite so much emphasis on claimed future upgradeability as it probably won't pan out (the last boards I bought had 18x multipliers and 667MHz FSB; Intel jumped from 533MHz FSB to 800MHz, and didn't go higher than 3.2GHz).

            My pr

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by edwdig ( 47888 )
        I know it's possible to build reliable AMD-based systems, but it seems to be harder work, and probably involves going with an Opteron on a Tyan or Supermicro board in order to be able to use an AMD chipset, rather than one of the third-party (e.g. VIA, SiS, ALI) chipsets.

        You do it the same way you build a reliable Intel one. Go with a motherboard from one of the larger brands and toss in some Crucial or Kingston RAM. I don't think AMD has made a chipset since the original Athlon launched. Generally you want
      • I don't know about the Intel side of things, but over on the AMD side of things, I wouldn't buy a Gigabyte or Asus board. For some reason, they have a good reputation for quality, but my experience is that they are junk with high failure rates. Personally I have had a lot more luck with what I call the "second tier" manufacturers like Soltek and Foxconn, and I don't mind the few extra bucks I save either (stay well away from the "third tier" such as PCCHips and ECS though). On the Intel side though, you

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by cowbutt ( 21077 )
          I don't know about the Intel side of things, but over on the AMD side of things, I wouldn't buy a Gigabyte or Asus board. For some reason, they have a good reputation for quality, but my experience is that they are junk with high failure rates.

          I heard this from the local mom and pop PC shop when I was shopping around for my last set of boards, but decided to trust my experience (i430HX and i810 Gigabyte boards for a friend, an i440BX Asus board myself) and, sure enough, it all worked out with the two i845

          • Well, it's my personal experience with Asus and Gigabyte that have turned me off of them. Here's my experience with them between my PC and my friend's PCs in terms of Socket A AMD systems:

            Dead:
            3 Asus boards
            2 Gigabyte boards
            1 MSI board
            1 Chaintech board
            1 PCChips board

            Still going:
            1 Soltek board (which is my desktop)
            1 Jetway board
            1 Biostar board

            Take that as you will, though it continues with the AMD64 stuff, friend who spent a lot of money on a high end Asus Socket 939 board had problems, the Soltek socket 754

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Raenex ( 947668 )
        I'm using a 486/66 with a 40MB hard drive as my router. I had a 700 mhz AMD system for over 6 years, up until about 6 months ago. I never spec'd them out for reliability. I did have to replace the motherboard on the 700 mhz system early in it's life, but that was back when a lot of motherboards were failing prematurely.

        It's too hard to get accurate predictions about how long a piece of hardware will last. I know there was the somewhat recent story about how hard drive mean-time to failure numbers were b
    • Core Duo Reliability Edition == Celeron. If you want to compromise on performance, go ahead...the chips are waiting for you.
    • First of all, the expected performance gain between any hardware generation -- video, CPU, RAM, whatever -- is only about 5%.

      In your actualy post, however you're confusing the enthusiast and home user environment with the business commodity hardware environment. If you want long-term support hardware, you need to go to a PC manufacturer, not to a chip designer.

      HP's dc5xxx and dc7xxx as well as Dell's OptiPlex series are very, very stable. At my last job, we ordered roughly 500 dc5000 PCs over the course o
    • "Now what I would like to see advertised - but won't - is slower but highly reliable motherboards, processors and memory at commercial prices."

      Then you should be reading this...
      http://www.sun.com/servers/coolthreads/t2000/index .xml [sun.com]

      It is _very_ conservatively designed I would expect
      many years of "up time". It's an 8-core machine. The
      cores are slow compared to a
      Intel C2D but overall it is a very powerfull little box

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by niko9 ( 315647 )
      The company your are looking for is Tyan. http://www.tyan.com/ [tyan.com] Their workstation and server boards are some of the most reliable around, i.e., for people in the know. You don't hear much about them from "mainstream" review sites because the boards lack l33t OC'ing features and super cool LED lit fans. Take a look at their workstation boards, they make a great desktop board alternative. Available for AMD and Intel CPU's.

      I have had zero issues with any series of boards I have used from them, and all of them w
    • "I can get HDDs that will do that, but where can I get the commodity silicon where the manufacturer will make a statement about long term reliability?"

      Okay, Off Topic, but I have to comment.

      I'm sitting here on ignore (aka hold) with Seagate trying to get satisfaction on a 25% failure rate on recent HD purchase (Maxtor 3H500F0). I purchased 12 drives at the same time, and have had 3 fail within the first month.

      I'm starting to wonder if my cell phone's battery is going to last for the duration of the phone c
      • Maxtor support always sucked. Getting an RMA for a drive is like pulling teeth. They want you to run their diagnostic software, which won't work on newer chipsets, before giving out an RMA. Hmm, I just poked through my drive pile and I don't have any Maxtor drives that are still under warranty.

        On the flip side, I've never had issues with Hitachi (and previously IBM). Plug the serial number in, give a vague reason as to why the drive is dead, get an RMA. Hell, I just checked, I didn't even have to giv
    • Now what I would like to see advertised - but won't - is slower but highly reliable motherboards, processors and memory at commercial prices.

      I think you mean commodity prices. Just underclock commodity stuff then. Commercial prices would be the pricing you get when you buy actual workstations and servers, think Xeon and Opteron.

      My way to get reliable systems is to get off-lease workstations on eBay and the like, where liquidators eBay them just to get rid of them, and they went pretty cheaply. All the on

  • What I would like to see in hardware reviews (Score:5, Insightful)

    by LarsWestergren ( 9033 ) on Monday June 25, 2007 @03:47AM (#19633259) Homepage Journal
    Do people still overclock? It is such a focus on this in online hardware reviews, but none of the people I know still do it, even the gamers. Power consumption, heat and noise is much more important to them. Low sample number to draw any significant conclusions from, I know, but still... Perhaps the market has moved on a bit?

    Also, whenever they do speed comparisons, I wish they would add in models from one and two years ago. I really don't care if a chip is 0,05% faster than its similarly priced competition, I want to know if it is a good time to upgrade my old computer.

    • Re:What I would like to see in hardware reviews (Score:5, Interesting)

      by suv4x4 ( 956391 ) on Monday June 25, 2007 @04:12AM (#19633359)

      Do people still overclock? It is such a focus on this in online hardware reviews, but none of the people I know still do it, even the gamers. Power consumption, heat and noise is much more important to them. Low sample number to draw any significant conclusions from, I know, but still... Perhaps the market has moved on a bit?


      You're right, the hardware reviewers are getting out of date with their metrics.

      Overclocking a modern CPU gets you mostly nothing nowadays. Gamers can still be found overclocking their *graphics cards*, but overclocking their Core 2 Duo's wouldn't really change anything for them (and I'm sure we'll reach a point where messing with your graphics card will be just as unnecessary as it is today with CPU-s, just this industry is younger than generic cpu).

      I mean, on laptops one of the features is dynamically underclocking the CPU for less power usage. It's the kind of market we're in.

      Multi-cores are lucrative area for servers, where no CPU amount is enough, and less so for desktops.

      No wonder the companies are concentrating on features such as power usage: there's basically nothing else they can impress us with (and low power usage allows smaller more mobile devices with longer battery life etc.).

      • Overclocking a modern CPU gets you mostly nothing nowadays. Gamers can still be found overclocking their *graphics cards*, but overclocking their Core 2 Duo's wouldn't really change anything for them (and I'm sure we'll reach a point where messing with your graphics card will be just as unnecessary as it is today with CPU-s, just this industry is younger than generic cpu).

        A lot of newer motherboards can auto-overclock your cpu and ATI/nVidia both include auto-overclocking (for the cards that support it) in

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by suv4x4 ( 956391 )
          I think it's pretty obvious that (for the desktop at least) automatic over and under clocking are going to be the norm. All you're buying is a minimum performance guarantee from Intel or AMD, your BIOS/software will do the rest.

          The motherboard clocking is just a gimmick which could actually damage your hardware if used in excess. It's not a trend, it's just fighting for attention in a crowded market.

          As for the graphics chips: When a chip has been tested to run at a certain clock rate and it runs fine, then

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dkf ( 304284 )

        No wonder the companies are concentrating on features such as power usage: there's basically nothing else they can impress us with (and low power usage allows smaller more mobile devices with longer battery life etc.)

        Low-power CPUs are also critical for large server farms, because when you have a few thousand processors together in a room, you've got a big heat problem if you haven't got a chunky aircon as well. Pumping all that heat in and out again is expensive, and indeed in many server farms it is the a

      • Go ahead, OVERCLOCK to your harts content. (Score:4, Informative)

        by viking80 ( 697716 ) on Monday June 25, 2007 @06:19AM (#19633805) Journal
        Of course people overclock. instead of buying the 2.6GHz Core 2 Duo, you just buy the 1.8GHz version and pay half the money ($160 insted of $320).

        Now just overclock it back up to 2.6GHz.

        You may want to do a little 2 corner testing (Voltage and Temp), just to make sure you are within stable regime.

        As long as you dont overvoltage the chip, there is really no reason not to max out the clock rate. As soon as the CPU idles, it underclocks automatically anyway, so you get the boost only when you need it.

        If you do any home video decoding, the difference is huge.

        To make the point clear: You can burn out a power transistor if you run it too hard, but this is not possible on a CPU. It will hang long before it even gets close to be damaged. If the chip overheats and/or is driven at a too high clock, it just hangs. Reset and cool, and it is good as new.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by suv4x4 ( 956391 )
          Of course people overclock. instead of buying the 2.6GHz Core 2 Duo, you just buy the 1.8GHz version and pay half the money ($160 insted of $320).

          Now just overclock it back up to 2.6GHz.

          All right, and what can you do with a 2.6 GHz Core 2 Duo that you can't with 1.8 GHz?

          I get the "half the money part", but I don't get "back to 2.6 GHz part".

          A) It just makes you feel smart (jeesh, I tricked Intel!).

          B) Makes you feel you get a better deal (hahah! I bought 1.8 GHz CPU and run it at 2.6 GHZ! .. and actually nee

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by DarkJC ( 810888 )
            You must've missed this part:

            If you do any home video decoding, the difference is huge.

            That's about one of the only sections where overclocking does make a huge difference. It's a big time saver.
          • you're right. nobody uses their computer for anything other than email and browsing the internet, so no one needs to upgrade their computer ever. There's absolutely no reason for these faster chips. Why would I ever need to do things faster?

            the point is, just because YOU don't need a faster computer doesn't mean that EVERYONE doesn't need a faster computer.
          • All right, and what can you do with a 2.6 GHz Core 2 Duo that you can't with 1.8 GHz?

            Nothing really, and there probably isn't anything that I can do on a 1.8Ghz Core 2 Duo that I can't do on my Sempron 3000+. But I can do it faster, and that's the whole point. The video decoding example is a good one. With my 2Ghz Core 2 Duo I can usually reencode mpeg2 to xvid in less time than it takes to watch the actual video. Compare to about 3x as long on the Sempron.
          • I do not know why you try to ridicule my points. Not very constructive. When converting a movie shot on my camcorder to mpeg4 H.264 I observe this:
            1.8GHz: 7 hours
            2.6GHz: 3 hours

            Compile time for a project is
            1.8GHz: 30 minutes
            2.6GHz: 12 minutes

            Not that the improvement is more than you would expect, as the pc is busy with other things as well during these tasks, with the extreme example below:

            A SW driver for an 802.11g radio uses 90% of the CPU at 1.8GHz, and only 50% at 2.6GHz.
            The performance difference for

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Fweeky ( 41046 )
          And then find the chip doesn't really want to run at 2.6GHz, and that it really deserved to be in the 1.8 bin. You will, of course, not immediately put the clock up to 2.6, you'll creep the clockrate up and put each stage through hours if not days of exhaustive testing exercising all the components of the chip (and not just, say, the ALUs). Don't forget to do it on a very hot day, and without your air conditioning on full blast.

          Not treating overclocking with the respect it deserves is a path to mysterious

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by xouumalperxe ( 815707 )
        Actually, the reason why overclocking the processor will do squat for a gamer's performance is because the bottleneck is on the graphics card. The day the graphics industry matures enough to be on par with the general purpose processor industry will not mean you won't get anything from overclocking the graphics card. Rather, it'll mean that you'll gain the most performance by overclocking both GPU and CPU (because neither is holding the other back). Of course, the question is "do you really need the extra p

      • Overclocking a modern CPU gets you mostly nothing nowadays.

        not always true. certain things will be greatly sped up with an overclocked CPU. ripping a CD or DVD, for instance. and if you dont have the latest and greatest video card, your CPU may be the bottleneck in games, and overclocking will help.

        yes, for the most part you're probably right; overclocking a given CPU wont make a whole lot of difference most of the time. but the same is true when going to purchase a CPU: an E6700 vs. an E6400 wont make

    • No, most people don't overclock, even though it has become MUCH simpler nowadays to do simple overclocks (as it no longer requires hardware tweaks). Furthermore, overclocking does decrease the reliability and longevity of the CPU, as has been mentioned before in this thread. I still think there is some merit for hardware sites to focus on overclocking mainly because it gives you an indication of the headroom available in the CPU architecture (merom/conroe/woodcrest in this case), which indirectly gives you

    • yes people still overclock. http://www.ocforums.com/ [ocforums.com]

      and yes you can get a lot more performance out of your processor by overclocking vs. buying the faster stock-rated chip. FSB is sort of the clock that everything in your system runs off of, so when you take an "old" Conroe chip that ran at 266mhz fsb and raise it up to 400mhz, you not only make that chip run faster, but you pretty much make everything run faster.

  • Over three billion Henries? That's a damn big coil. Yes, I have nothing better to do than nitpick. Why do you ask?

  • Xeon (Score:3, Informative)

    by AnimeDTA ( 963237 ) on Monday June 25, 2007 @04:54AM (#19633505)
    Some models of Xeons run at 1066 and 1333. Just off the specs on the article I'd say they released those Xeon CPUs as desktop model on the LGA775 socket. The larger cache, higher bus speed, thermal design and Smart Cache match up to the Xeon E51xx and E53xx.
  • Running a CINEbench that lasts 18 seconds is not a decent test of stability. Even hobbyist overclockers ultimately aim to end up with a system that they can use day in, day out for several hours at a time.

    I've got a C2D E6700 cooled with a modified freezer system (Vapochill) which cools it down to -40 or so. Despite the fact I could boot it into Windows at 4.5Ghz, it was not stable at these speeds. I have to "make do" with 4.3Ghz for daily running.

    Whilst I can just about believe that 3.9Ghz would be achi
    • Running a CINEbench that lasts 18 seconds is not a decent test of stability. Even hobbyist overclockers ultimately aim to end up with a system that they can use day in, day out for several hours at a time.

      We run Prime95 [mersenne.org] for at least 48-72 hours - while also exercising the disks in the system (and the graphics card if possible). While Prime95 is mainly used for a distributed computing project, it's proven so sensitive to CPU/RAM issues that it ships with a "torture test mode". The calculations that it p

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