1155 malfunction question

Alright, any other reccomendations? I'd like to hear a few different opinions.

Didn't realize the I7-960's are more powerful than these new sandy bridge CPU's. Is it really all hype?

Wow ... having a downer of a day, Eagle?

Take his advice with a heaping helping of salt, Buggeh.

Reviews are not written to generate excitement and influence you to buy. Intel's marketing crap, sure. But the reviews aren't Intel's marketing crap.

Even Intel's flagship 980X has a hard time beating a stock 2600K processor. Only in apps that take advantage of all of the Hyperthreaded cores does it pull significantly ahead. 2600K beats pretty much every other processor in nearly all tests.

My recommendation: 2600K. Only the 980X is its equal and sometime superior.

For the price, nothing can touch it.

Any advice is helpful! I must admit though that I did wonder where the negativity came from, since any benchmark/test I saw put the 2600K on top of the lists, only being beat by the mentioned 980x. My friend is not a millionaire however, so that one's out the window. Sandybridge did seem really costefficient.

The real difficulty is going to be locating a mainboard for the 2600K. Most retailers have pulled them from the shelves and sent them back to the manufacturer. Your buddy will be lucky to find one before mid-March or April when the fixed boards become available.

If he absolutely needs a computer now, have him do his best to try to find a 1155 board. If he can't find one then he can get a different CPU/mainboard for around the same price.

If he can wait, then buy after the new fixed boards come out.

He won't regret purchasing a Sandy Bridge system. Even with the recall, I don't regret mine. I'm enjoying the awesome performance now, and I get a brand new board for free in April or so.

Only one of your points actually is a valid concern, and that's "How many GPUs can you run at PCIe x16 with SB?"

The rest...

How long does ANY processor last when overclocked to the top speed tier? As long as you keep temps and voltages within reason, years. I've been overclocking for over 12 years, and have never fried a CPU. Celeron II 300A @ 450MHz? Yep. Pentium4 1.6A Northwood core @ 2.4GHz? Yep. Athlon II X4 620 @ 3.2GHz? Yep. Sandy Bridge 2500K @ 4.8GHz? Yep. And many in between that I don't remember off-hand.

How big is the triple-channel bandwidth of the X58 setup? In synthetic benchmarks, it's huge. In real-world apps, the bandwidth edge mostly disappears.

Why did they release a new chip for 1366? They have to keep up the pretense of their tiered system. They know as well as we do that Sandy Bridge MS (the mainstream version available now) outperforms most 1366 CPUs. About the only real advantage 1366 has is more PCIe lanes, plus more cores on the flagship CPU. They'll be fixing that deficiency with Sandy Bridge E and the Patsburg PCH.

Ok, Eagle Eye, then I'll go against you.

I actually study marketing and I'm an avid Tom's Hardware reader. This site hasn't backed up ANY Intel CPU in years as a recommend buy for many years until the release of the i5-2500k. The only problem with Sandy Bridge (aside from the tragic chipset flaw) is in performance with 3-Way or 4-Way multi-card setups.
Sure, if you want to spend $6000 dollars on a 4-WAY SLI machine with a hexa-core CPU that will be worth about half it's value the next year, then yeah, go with 1366 socket. But if you want unmatched perfomance at a reasonable price, Sandy Bridge is the way to go.

Oh... and your knowledge of marketing appears to be taken from a comedy website (maybe Cracked?)... go read a book

I have heard of exactly two problems with the Sandy Bridge platform.

1. The Cougar Point PCH SATA issue. Intel did a nice job owning up to that right away.
2. The socket burn issue at high voltages. Once again, Foxconn quality control at its worst.

I don't have time to troll more than a couple of forums per day, but I haven't seen any problem trends (other than the usual "board X doesn't work with RAM Y" type stuff which happen with any platform) on the ones I do patrol.

If there really are other widespread problems with the Sandy Bridge platform, please enlighten me. Links would be preferred.

Oh, and if anyone else knows of any problems, go ahead and chime in.

^+1 all the way..the bottom line is money and 1000$ for a CPU that can be cornered by 200~300$ CPU is simply funny
as for " Don't overlook the warning Intel and the mobo maker gives you regarding overclocking"..what warning ?!?!,have mu 25K@5.1 running 24/7 on offset mode
" new top dog will be introduced to replace the 1366"..thats for suckers and bragging rights ,Sandy B @5.0+ is more than you will need for quite some times

RAM compatibility complaints are the realm of the individual board manufacturer, not the processor maker. I have heard that ASUS boards don't like G.Skill RAM, but I'm using four sticks of two different densities in my ASRock board with no problems at all. That's on ASUS, not Intel. Every platform has them.

And the freezing issues would likely be fixed by the judicious application of voltage. You just have to find the right voltage to apply, and the right place to apply it. I had freezing issues when I was manually overclocking, but they stopped dead as soon as I increased one particular setting. I don't know if this solution was found before or after you abandoned SB, but it was widely available by the time I had the problem.

If people are having freezing problems at stock speeds and voltages, then there is likely a hardware problem/incompatibility somewhere in their particular setup. If they are having problems only when overclocking, they need to read the many guides that are now available on the internet.

I'm sorry you had a problem that you weren't able to fix, but I won't recommend abandoning the Sandy Bridge platform without problems directly attributable to the platform itself.

Hmmm.

Evidently Eagle got pissed off and removed his replies from the thread. Sorry dude.

Buggeh:
Your buddy will not regret waiting to get a Sandy Bridge system. Really.

If he can't wait, then a low-end i7 would be the alternative. And they are powerful CPUs, it's just that Sandy Bridge beats them most of the time.