Cache: q9550 or i7 920

[konchus]

q9550 has 12 mb cache and i7 920 has 8mb...now i hear it depends on what ur doing when making the choice...its crazy cause theres only about a $6 defference on them @ newegg...ill be using this system as a daw, moderate gaming, and burnin hella cd's

 

[dragonsprayer]

depends on how much your going to send, how long you plan to keep and if you need upgradiblity later

your looking at it wrong

the mobo and ram are $200 more does that work in your price? is the upgrade ablity worth $200

for most people i7 is the right choice - if your tight for cash and your not upgrading the E0 q9550 will run 3.8ghz in 780i FTW mobo

skip all other mobos made with nvidia chipsets unless made to specs of the evga 780i FTW

other mobos and non E0 chips will run 3.2ghz no problems

 

[dragonsprayer]

from what you said either will work

you do know that q9550 runs ddr2 that is $40

and i7 is ddr3 only
and they are 2 different and complete not inchangeable

q9550 will work fine

 

[4745454b]

Cache don't mean swat. The Athlon x2 had much less cache then the P4s of the day, and they had no problems keeping up with the P4s. The higher end ones could even handle the P4 EE's, which had 2MBs of L3 cache. Like clock speed, cache is only one aspect of what makes a CPU "fast". You can't compare cache directly while ignoring other things. For example, the i7 might have less cache, but it has an IMC so it doesn't really need a lot of cache.

 

[mamw93]

Wait off on buying a processor. Intel is releasing three new Core i7's that'll replace the current ones. They are all pretty much the same but the clocks are a little bit higher and I think there might be some more cache in them as well. There will a 975 Extreme, 950, and a 925 that have some better specs but the price may go down so hold off. Get those so you'll be able to say that you have the latest and greatest instead of those old Core i7 920, 940, 965's that aren't that cool!! HAHAHA!!!

 

[shadowthor]

New isn't always the best, the i7 925 probably has less overclockability considering the i7 920 could outperform the i7 940 without a sweat when overclocking.

 

[ministerpaul]

It comes down to information flow and the I7 core has two pipelines per core for a total of eight. The OS views the I7 Core Quad as a Eight Core. The speed gains are impressive, not revolutionary. Until the Windows and third party software programmers catch up with the currently technology we will not see its full potential. This is why the Mac Osx operating system is revolutionary.