Info the 990x?

[Gekko Shadow]

Ok firstly, i am NOT seeking an exact answer. Just thought i'd make it question to give away some free points for a best answer :lol:

Anywho, i was just wondering if any one here had some interesting info for the upcoming i7 990x to be released (when? maybe you know? ).

Pretty much an open question - just wanted to see if anyone knew more about it - price (ftw? ) - or what not lol.

 

[reccy]

March 2011 - Im basing this on a DaveGuru4DMax review

 

[Gekko Shadow]

march? dam lol. Yeah i kept finding info that sometime this year - and sometime next year. I think next year would be most likely. But it would be kinda retarded as the sandy bridges will be coming out. Course they won't be the performance line chips - but eh Intel does what it does :lol:

 

[LePhuronn]

The 990X offers nothing over the 980X other than a tiny speed bump for people too lazy or too terrified to take the 980X's unlocked multiplier up a single notch.

You may think releasing it amongst the Sandy Bridge chips is foolhardy, but so far SB has nothing that can touch the hexacores - hexacore SB isn't due to around this time next year apparently. Also X58 will be around for a while for stupid-end gaming rigs because of the number of PCI-Express pathways.

Or so I gather.

 

[Gekko Shadow]

^+1 very true xD this makes total sense. I mean a .13mhz more seems like it won't do much a difference.

 

[etk]

It will replace the 980X at the same price point. Along the same lines as the 920 to 930 changeover. While it may be useless to someone who owns a 980X, it would give a 920 owner an (unnecesary) upgrade path on 1366, Since socket 2011 won't release until Q2or Q3 2011.

Sidenote, People who use this level of CPU power buy E5XXX CPU's, but I suppose everyone needs a flagship...

 

[4745454b]

I haven't heard, whats up with SB and the number of PCIe lanes?

 

[etk]

I havn't heard anything directly, but Intel has a court order against it not do do anything with PCIe lanes that would limit GPU performance (Nvidia thinks intel's integrated GPU is unfair business, as it locks them out of the market) So Intel will face stiff legal penalties if they skimp on PCIe lanes, especially after they just had to pay out Billions over the whole anticompetitive business practice thing. I would be very surprised if there weren't enough.

 

[LePhuronn]

Sidenote, People who use this level of CPU power buy E5XXX CPU's, but I suppose everyone needs a flagship...

Not true - I make use of all 6 of my cores, but don't yet need to go dual-CPU, and given how robust the 980X is beyond 4GHz OC why spend the extra money on a Xeon?

Oh, and I think you mean X5xxx because the E5xxx were bottom-end Core 2 Duos ;-)

I would be very surprised if there weren't enough.

It's the P55 situation again as far as I've read, so it's not like Intel are skimping on lanes, but if you want a beefy GPU setup then you're restricted to running the cards half-cocked.

 

[etk]

Not true - I make use of all 6 of my cores, but don't yet need to go dual-CPU, and given how robust the 980X is beyond 4GHz OC why spend the extra money on a Xeon?

Oh, and I think you mean X5xxx because the E5xxx were bottom-end Core 2 Duos ;-)



It's the P55 situation again as far as I've read, so it's not like Intel are skimping on lanes, but if you want a beefy GPU setup then you're restricted to running the cards half-cocked.

An E5630 is a Xeon. You can get two for price of the 980X. It has much lower TDP (which really starts to matter in high end builds.) On a simple dual socket home setup, you could overclock them to the moon.

 

[LePhuronn]

An E5630 is a Xeon. You can get two for price of the 980X. It has much lower TDP (which really starts to matter in high end builds.) On a simple dual socket home setup, you could overclock them to the moon.

A misread on my part then - interpretted your comment of "this level of CPU power" to be referring to hexacore processors, of with the X5000s are the Xeon equivalents. E5000 series Xeons seem to have totally left my memory!

 

[boe]

The 990X offers nothing over the 980X other than a tiny speed bump for people too lazy or too terrified to take the 980X's unlocked multiplier up a single notch.

You may think releasing it amongst the Sandy Bridge chips is foolhardy, but so far SB has nothing that can touch the hexacores - hexacore SB isn't due to around this time next year apparently. Also X58 will be around for a while for stupid-end gaming rigs because of the number of PCI-Express pathways.

Or so I gather.

Can you tell me what you mean by "Also X58 will be around for a while for stupid-end gaming rigs because of the number of PCI-Express pathways" ? I'm thinking about building a system for a number of purposes including gaming and I'd like to know what is changing.

 

[LePhuronn]

In a nutshell only X58 has enough PCI-E lanes to run multiple graphics cards at full whack - a modern graphics card uses 16 lanes to operate at full bandwidth, so when you want to run more than one you can easily use them all up.

P55 for example will run a single card at 16x but will drop pair of them to 8x each because there's not a lot of lanes to go round. The effect is that this reduced bandwidth causes a performance hit on the cards.

As far as I'm aware, mainstream Sandy Bridge will be in the same boat.

It's a lot more involved in that, but that's the very quick overview as far as I understand it.

 

[Gekko Shadow]

^ And adding NF200's won't help with that? As far as i understand - NF200 chips would help keep the bandwidth at 16, or am i wrong? O-o

 

[LePhuronn]

NF200 would sort that out, as some of the tests on Toms have shown with the P55 boards that have it.

Will we see P65 and P67 boards with NF200? Who knows.

 

[Gekko Shadow]

Stoopid intel. making us wait. :lol:

Now if i recall - the NF200's are actually a disadvantage on low resolutions? Not that it matters much tho :E lol

 

[Gekko Shadow]

Best answer selected by Gekko Shadow.

 

[LePhuronn]

NF200 causes a little latency because of the extra operation involved in getting all the data out to the cards (nothing humanly noticeable though), but I don't know about problems in low resolutions.

Certainly you don't see any benefits from multi-GPUs in low resolutions (frame rates generally are high anyway).

 

[Mousemonkey]

This topic has been closed by Mousemonkey