Core 2 Duo price drop?

stewie

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Do you guys anticipate a price drop on Core 2 Duo processors now that the Quadros are released? If so, how soon? I am trying to put together a new system and would wait to buy a Duo if I was pretty sure the prices would drop in the next month or so. Cheers
 

infornography42

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Not really.

I suspect there might be a very minor price drop on most of them and probably a fairly noticable one on the Core2Exreme, but overall nothing to hold your breath over.

Intel is just beefing out their high end right now I think.
 

wiz83

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The E6300's I bought about 3 weeks ago cost me $178 shipped. The price has actually increased a couple $ as demand for them increased. These E6300 could be easily overclocked above 3.5GHz with some good cooling. I'm running 3.409GHz at stock HSF, below stock Vcore.
 

Doughbuy

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Only high-end by only probably a bit, Intel planned to have the X6800 as the premire performance chip right now and the QX6700 as the future-proof chip so they're not really competing against each other per say... but I expect a bit of decrease in the top two... probably..

Others, most likely not... don't hold your breath. Only thing worth waiting to drop right now is memory and HDD prices...
 

purdueguy

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I agree with everyone else. There's only two things that would cause price drops: 1) Competition 2) Nobody's willing to pay the asked for price.

As of right now, Intel has no competition for high-end dual or quad-core chips. They will ask what they want to what they believe the market will bear. And since there's plenty of enthusiasts that can afford a $1000 chip, don't go looking for this to impact prices.

Right now there's no reason to wait for a drop in Core 2 Duo (unless you plan on getting an X6800 or X6700 - these might drop a little like Wusy said). I'd just hold off for another week or two before buying a video card. Though from the looks of things, the 8800GTX and GTS are just going to be more expensive than the 7950GX2 and not cause any price drops.

nVidia is in the exact same place as Intel. No competition and I'm sure there's going to be plenty of people willing to spend the money.
 

JeanLuc

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Do you guys anticipate a price drop on Core 2 Duo processors now that the Quadros are released? If so, how soon? I am trying to put together a new system and would wait to buy a Duo if I was pretty sure the prices would drop in the next month or so. Cheers


There was news report saying that Intel has a lot surplus chips out on the market at the moment which is great for buyers as it keep the price down (supply out strips demand price falls theory) so if your looking at C2D now would be a good time to buy.
 

rushfan

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The E6300's I bought about 3 weeks ago cost me $178 shipped. The price has actually increased a couple $ as demand for them increased. These E6300 could be easily overclocked above 3.5GHz with some good cooling. I'm running 3.409GHz at stock HSF, below stock Vcore.

Whoa! 8O

What are your temperatures (idle and 100% load) according to Core Temp or TAT?

Is your system stable when both cores are 100% loaded? You can use ORTHOS, dual Prime95's or TAT to test this.

Sorry - I'm skeptical. 3.41 GHz with the stock HSF sounds iffy - below stock Vcore is a little outrageous.
 

bitsurfr46

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This is a good question. IMHO the QuadCore from Intel will not have much impact on Core Duo prices because Intel is introducing them at $900+ a piece and is more focused on keeping AMD from gaining any additional market share. The real battle here is between Core Duo and the Athlon XPx2. THG is good at showing the price performance curve for both systems. I believe it would be get to wait to see how this plays out until AMd release there 4 core CPU.
 

Invader

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Intel is bringing out the E4300 processor in a couple of months which runs at about the same speed as the E6300 but has a 800FSB and some features disabled. It's price will be $150. Then they will release the single-core Core2 series to replace the Celeron. I wouldn't anticipate Intel reducing the C2Duo prices much or nobody would buy these lesser series.

It would make more sense to abandon the E6300/6400 chip speeds and make the E6600 the base C2D, for instance, at perhaps a slightly lower price and bring out more higher speed chips, as we all know the C2D is capable of achieving.
 

Doughbuy

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Not to mention... Intel is having a heck of a quarter... they need revenue bad since the price war with AMD is killing both sides. Dropping prices is the last thing they need, especially before the holiday season where the most PC's are usually bought.

Well, not really killing... but it is taking a toll.. However, AMD has it worse since their reserve is nowhere as large as Intel's. Comapre Hoover dam to the little sandcastle you build when your at the beach.

Actually, dropping prices again would be a smart thing since AMD is pretty weak right now.. but Intel's not that evil... right?? :twisted:
 

jorberg

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I've noticed a slight price drop on the E6600's. I've been watching them for a couple weeks now. They were at 330 or so, but I've seen them as low as 310 now. Not a HUGE price drop, but a slight one.
 

bitsurfr46

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IMHO I'd wait. Have you considered an AMD X2 system? The real competition now pricewise is between Intel and AMD. Intel is determined not to allow AMD increase its market share and will react aggressively to keep Core Duo CPUs competitively priced compared to whatever AMD offers. Tom's hardware offers a good analysis of this in the CPU section.
Also see this link at Extremetech for a review of Intel's QuadCore:

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,2049698,00.asp

Bill
 

fatcat

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I pretty much agree with everyone else here and don't feel that intel is going to lower their prices just yet. I'd do the same if I had the full hand and a couple of aces up my sleeve like they do now. It's simply good business.
 

JBS181818

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with the exception of the x6800, everything still fits in perfect pricing tiers since they were so spread out to begin with. However, even the the x6800 is the same price as the new 2.66 ghz quad core, its still faster for gaming, overclocking asside, so it too probably won't get a price drop either. We will see price drops once they start coming out with mainstream quadcore in the 1.8 and 2.1 ghz areas.
 

Talon

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Agreed the two top-end Intel procs may see a minor drop if any.

As far as if Intel is that evil, I'd guess sure, its big business. I'd think they might stay their hand more likely due to fear of "monopoly" repurcussions. They don't want to be accused of trying to push AMD out of the market but if I were them and it was my wallet I might push just a lil. LOL
 

casewhite

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Apparently every one missed the article yesterday in bloomberb. Intel has had a 59% increase in inventory and since they previously blew out the core duo chips this is most likely Core 2 woodcrest.
"Intel, whose semiconductors power more than 70 percent of all personal computers, had $4.48 billion in stockpiles on Sept. 30, up 59 percent from a year earlier." http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=alGJJnX8OrSU&refer=news With the adoption of HPCC http://icl.cs.utk.edu/hpcc/index.html as the bidding standard for most 4P and larger uses. The benchmarks you see posted on Tom's and Anandtech and Hexus are for HPL type tests only. Intel has not been able to achieve the highend server or HPC sales they have wanted. Intel received a 100% shut out on DOE contracts the third quarter this year and the only quadcore contract went to Cray/AMD. http://investors.cray.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=98390&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=873357&highlight=

This award was due to Cray AMD's vastly superior PTrans and random access scores.

"To David Womble, acting director of Computation, Computers, and Math at Sandia, "The question is [similar to] how much traffic can you move how fast through crowded city streets." Red Storm, he says, does so well because it has "a balance that doesn't exist in other machines between communication bandwidth [the ability of a processor to get data it needs from anywhere in the machine quickly] and floating point computation [how fast each processor can do the additions, multiplications and other operations it needs to do in solving problems]."

"More technically, Red Storm posted 1.8 TB/sec (1.8 trillion bytes per second) on one HPCC test: an interconnect bandwidth challenge called PTRANS, for parallel matrix transpose. This test, requiring repeated "reads," "stores," and communications among processors, is a measure of the total communication capacity of the internal interconnect. Sandia's achievement in this category represents 40 times more communications power per teraflop (trillion floating point operations per second) than the PTRANS result posted by IBM's Blue Gene system that has more than 10 times as many processors.

"Red Storm is the first computer to surpass the 1 terabyte-per-second (1 TB/sec) performance mark measuring communications among processors -- a measure that indicates the capacity of the network to communicate when dealing with the most complex situations.

"The "random access" benchmark checks performance in moving individual data rather than large arrays of data. Moving individual data quickly and well means that the computer can handle chaotic situations efficiently.

"Red Storm also did very well in categories it did not win, finishing second in the world behind Blue Gene in fft ("Fast Fourier Transform," a method of transforming data into frequencies or logarithmic forms easier to work with); and third behind Purple and Blue Gene in the "streams" category (total memory bandwidth measurement). Higher memory bandwidth helps prevent processors from being starved for data." http://www.physorg.com/news62939660.html
IBM's Cell/Opteron design promises to be even faster. http://www.supercomputingonline.com/article.php?sid=11894

DOE contracts start at about 10,000 Cpus and go up to 125,000 cpus. Since Intel didn't win any of the 14 contracts issue I suspect that they have an obvious surplus of Core 2 inventory. If Intel expets to win any future competions they need to redesign their cpus to work togehter on an integrated basis rather than on single cpu performance. Their designs give them an edge in the enthusiast market today that may be short lived as GPU acceleration overtakes CPU calculations. As Stanford University says:

"Now in 2006, we are looking forward to another major advance in capabilities. This advance utilizes the new, high performance Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) from ATI to achieve performance previously only possible on supercomputers. With this new technology (as well as the new Cell processor in Sony’s PlayStation 3), we will soon be able to attain performance on the 100 gigaflop scale per computer. With this new software and hardware, we will be able to push Folding@Home a major step forward."http://folding.stanford.edu/FAQ-ATI.html
That is 2.5 times faster than Core 2 and 1.25 times faster than Intel's Kentsfield and can be accomplished by adding a second video card on a crossfire motherboard. http://ati.amd.com/technology/crossfire/physics/index.html
Since the US Government HPC use alone is 6 times the enthusiast market , Intel needs to rethink its marketing and engineering strategy or the inventory will continue to build as the GPU and Cell chips make quadcore and dual core obsolete.
 

rushfan

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Sorry - I'm skeptical. 3.41 GHz with the stock HSF sounds iffy - below stock Vcore is a little outrageous.

Check the link in his Sig for all the discussion.

Ahh..

Thanks for pointing it out. I am less skeptical now, though the 3.41 GHz thing while undervolted surprises me. I'll read the whole thread through.

I have an E6300/Gigabyte S3 rig at home waiting to be assembled. It's an early Christmas gift for a relative. The video card is kinda weak (X800 regular) but it's for a 50 year old who's been "gaming" on a PII 400 for six years. This thing's gonna knock him out, regardless!
 

stewie

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Thanks for all the input everyone. Guess I will be putting something together w/ a E6300 soon after all. Cheers.
 
G

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I would think these Chips are Pentium 4/Pentium D/ Celeron D...

All the Core product have good demand, I doubt they would have that much inventory in such a small amount of time!
 

evilr00t

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If Intel gets desperate, they could make boards that only POST with Netburst, where you could then change the BIOS's "CONROE support" setting to "on" :lol:
 

wiz83

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61C at 100% full load on both cores. Idling at low 40's C.
66C at 3.5GHz 100% full load both cores, but didn't quite like the high temp, so I tuned it down to 3409MHz.
 

rushfan

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... I have an E6300/Gigabyte S3 rig at home waiting to be assembled. It's an early Christmas gift for a relative ...

What are you waiting for? Get a good set of RAM and motherboard, and crank that dude ... :)

Read over my siggy's link of it's potential ... :)

I have everything I need but I chose DDR2 667 for this build since I plan on just a mild overclock - 2.33 GHz at the least. I might go higher if the RAM allows it. It's "rendition" brand memory - probably not junk but not exactly OCZ or Crucial either.

Are you using 1.28v to run your E6300 @ 3.41 GHz? I experienced the same thing that you did - a 90 MHz increase to 3.50 GHz caused a 5 degree increase in idle and load temperatures. The additional 4% overclock isn't worth it, if you ask me.
 

Coops07

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nVidia is in the exact same place as Intel. No competition

Although Nvidia and Intel are not working together, it seems like they should be eh? That is until AMD and ATI make their triumphant return to the market with 4x4 and RD600!!! :D (sarcasm)