2011 New Technology

[ca-duck]

Greetings overclocking gods of the Tom’s Hardware forum.

I beseech you all for kindly guidance as I rate my knowledge level as “advanced beginner”

I built my computer eight years ago and am now ready to build another. My desire is to create a system that will allow me to try some gaming as well as experiment and learn the joys of overclocking and video editing. And it would be desirable that the system be future proof as long as possible. And I am somewhat confident I can do that with the knowledge I have accumulated on the new tech for 2011.

However I am finding some of the articles on the new technology for 2011 a bit fragmented. That is to say that my little brain is having a problem forming a complete picture of the advantages of one thing over another.
Here is my confusion:

Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge

P67 or H67

Z68 or x78

 

[rolli59]

Go with Sandy Bridge 2500K on a good P67 board, when LGA2011 comes out there is going to be a big price premium.

 

[suteck]

Sandy bridge is out and ivy bridge is not yet, estimated release date is late 2011 or like most Intel products it will be Q1-2012. P series board doesn't support on chip graphics and H does. P67 chipset supports 2x8 CrossFire and SLI while H67 only supports a single x16 slot Only the K series processors can be overclocked more than ~3%. BLCK is no longer the way to overclock. The K series has an unlocked multiplier and that will be the only way to overclock. While H67 allows for memory and graphics overclocking, it doesn’t support any amount of processor overclocking. If you want to overclock your Sandy Bridge, you need a P67 motherboard. So it's a matter of preference for overclocking or onchip graphics.

Biggest question is do you want to do it now or later / next year?

 

[popatim]

The new video encoding support, quick sync, built into the SB chips are only available on the chips with the built in graphics, and as of yet it does not work if a discrete GPU is used.

 

[suteck]

All sandy bridges are built with on-die graphics - that's one of the biggest attributes. It's the chipset family, P or H, on the motherboard that matters whether or not you can use it. And they work buy them selves or with discrete graphic cards, or, no on-die graphics support with dual X 8 video cards in crossfireX or SLI motherboards built with the "P" chipset family, (even if you only use 1 video card). So you make the motherboard decision based on which of those you want to use and what components you want to overclock - if any.

 

[MU_Engineer]

Greetings overclocking gods of the Tom’s Hardware forum.

I beseech you all for kindly guidance as I rate my knowledge level as “advanced beginner”

I built my computer eight years ago and am now ready to build another. My desire is to create a system that will allow me to try some gaming as well as experiment and learn the joys of overclocking and video editing. And it would be desirable that the system be future proof as long as possible. And I am somewhat confident I can do that with the knowledge I have accumulated on the new tech for 2011.

However I am finding some of the articles on the new technology for 2011 a bit fragmented. That is to say that my little brain is having a problem forming a complete picture of the advantages of one thing over another.
Here is my confusion:

...and we will try to help.

Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge

Sandy Bridge. Ivy Bridge is a process shrink of Sandy Bridge to 22 nm. It won't be out until at least a year from now, perhaps longer.

P67 or H67

P67. P67 is the only Sandy Bridge chipset that will let you overclock and it is also the best choice if you want to use a discrete (add-in) graphics card. H67 is what you would want if you want to use integrated graphics, which you do not if you want to game.

Z68 or x78

P67. Neither are out yet, so it would be pretty hard to buy a board with those chipsets on them right now.

Other technology coming down the pike that may be of interest to you if you do not need to get a machine right now would be the 6 and 8-core LGA1356 Sandy Bridge CPUs and AMD's Bulldozer. Bulldozer is a brand-new microarchitecture out of AMD that will be here in the spring, while the 6 and 8-core Sandy Bridges will be out in the fall.