Ordered i7-950 Saturday Night OMG

[scurbdog]

Saturday night I ordered from Amazon (no tax free ship-prime California) the i7-950 for $289 and the Gigabyte Udr3 board for $199. These will be delivered Tueday the 4th 2011. Now I can refuse the shipment if I choose and look at the SB chips. My question is will it be worth it.

I shop from Amazon to save on tax and fast shipping and Amazon doesn't always have the parts that a newegg has.

Like I wanted the Asus x58 MB but it wasn't sold by Amazon, so I chose the Gigabyte. I want a new build but don't need it now, but I want it. I'm not a overclocker and if the savings is under $100 then SB may be to much a hassle. Amazon might now even stock the SB motherboards (all of them) at start. What should I do? Take delivery and keep it, or refuse shipment and look over my options?

 

[jimmysmitty]

Well the Sandy Bridge CPUs are going to be a bit better and the Core i7 2600K is set for $317. But the etailers will up the prices to make more money on them so its hard to say. If you can spend the extra money, I would go with a Sandy Bridge CPU.

But here is the thing, Newegg is a better PC parts place than Amazon by a large margin. Plus they normally ship out of City of Industry, CA so it wont take long to get to you (I live in south west AZ and I get stuff from them in 2 days). And unless CA has a etailer tax Newegg shouldn't have it either.

And normally Newegg offers either free shipping or really cheap shipping. I got a entire computer build, including a 60 pound Thermaltake Xaser VI for less than $10 bucks. Normally 60 pounds alone would be about 30+ bucks.

 

[scurbdog]

So I think you saying that I should just keep the i7-950. The problem with newegg is the tax, so even though my upgrade path is stifled with 1366 socket, it may just be a wash.

 

[Raidur]

The i5 2500k is another good choice at $216 and should smash the i7 950.

Definitely go for SB. Hell they get to ~4.8ghz on air!

However the P67/H67 chipset will be somewhat limited compared to X58/X68 in some areas (PCI express slots for one) so take a look at that.

 

[DXRick]

I just built a system with the i7 950 with Gigabyte X58-USB3 motherboard and an HD 6870 video card. I bought the components a month ago, procrastinated for 3 weeks, and finally built it a week ago with Win 7 64-bit.

Yesterday, I saw the various SB reviews and felt a bit disappointed to see that the 2500K matches or beats the 950 at a cheaper price point, but there are several things to consider:

1. The SB CPUs and mobos aren't available yet. How long until they are and the prices what they should be? I didn't want to wait much longer to find out.

2. The P67 chipset is like the P55 chipset in how it manages memory and the PCI bus. I like that I can use my new USB 3.0 external hard drive without impacting my video card's performance (especially if I xFire two cards later). I also like having 6GB memory over having to go with 4GB or 8GB. So, the reasons for chosing X58 over P55 (and P67) are still valid.

So, the current SB release is for the low and mid end. I would rather wait for the higher end (p69?) release.

Now, in your case, can you refuse the shipment if you wanted to? What would happen there? It might be better to receive it and just return the mobo, CPU, and memory, and keep the other parts. Do you want to wait however long it's going to take for SB parts to be available?

If you decide to go with your X58 purchase, you won't be disappointed. My new system is blazingly fast (compared to the old P4 system it replaced). For games there isn't much of a difference, and you have the option to xFire or SLI in the future. The only reason I can see for waiting for SB is if you are into heavy video encoding.

So, there is no point in returning it and waiting for SB, unless you have a specifc need for it (like needing to do a lot of video encoding on large files).

 

[hogan773]

Wow - I said in another post "I wonder who will be closest to the pin" in terms of buying old tech at current prices and regretting it.

You guys might be battling for closest to the pin!

I'd return that Amazon i7 950 all day long and buy new tech for same price.

Don't get into this rationalizing "yeah but SB isnt available yet and we don't know how much it will really cost".

It will be available NEXT WEEK and yes we do know how much it will cost....just some quick reading on Tom's or Anandtech will confirm all that.

Just my opinion of course.....i7 950 is still a great system of course.

 

[jimmysmitty]

I just built a system with the i7 950 with Gigabyte X58-USB3 motherboard and an HD 6870 video card. I bought the components a month ago, procrastinated for 3 weeks, and finally built it a week ago with Win 7 64-bit.

Yesterday, I saw the various SB reviews and felt a bit disappointed to see that the 2500K matches or beats the 950 at a cheaper price point, but there are several things to consider:

1. The SB CPUs and mobos aren't available yet. How long until they are and the prices what they should be? I didn't want to wait much longer to find out.

2. The P67 chipset is like the P55 chipset in how it manages memory and the PCI bus. I like that I can use my new USB 3.0 external hard drive without impacting my video card's performance (especially if I xFire two cards later). I also like having 6GB memory over having to go with 4GB or 8GB. So, the reasons for chosing X58 over P55 (and P67) are still valid.

So, the current SB release is for the low and mid end. I would rather wait for the higher end (p69?) release.

Now, in your case, can you refuse the shipment if you wanted to? What would happen there? It might be better to receive it and just return the mobo, CPU, and memory, and keep the other parts. Do you want to wait however long it's going to take for SB parts to be available?

If you decide to go with your X58 purchase, you won't be disappointed. My new system is blazingly fast (compared to the old P4 system it replaced). For games there isn't much of a difference, and you have the option to xFire or SLI in the future. The only reason I can see for waiting for SB is if you are into heavy video encoding.

So, there is no point in returning it and waiting for SB, unless you have a specifc need for it (like needing to do a lot of video encoding on large files).

It would probably be X68 if anything. Who knows right now as Intel ahsn't said anything. As for availability, since Intel is releasing it on the 5th (tomorrow) I would assume thats the day vendors can sell them.

While the P67 is using DMI instead of QPI, it is a second generation (hence the ability to use up to DDR32133MHz) and will be faster than the original DMI. Still slower than QPI but I don't see the use of QPI in anything but a workstation or server. As for the CF/SLI, it wont hurt it enough. Even current gen GPUs (HD6980/GTX580) cannot saturate a single X8 PCIe 2.0 bus so CF and SLi probably wont be hurt. The only way to see a difference is in quad CF/Tri SLI or when using two dual GPU cards which are extremley overpriced in my eyes. Then again LGA1356/2011 (whatever Intel uses) will have PCIe 3.0 instead of PCIe 2.0.

Right now Windows 7 is great with 4GB although I wouldn't mind 8GB just to say I have it. As long as you do 4GB+ on 7 64 you are golden.

I doubt buying a X58 setup will be regreted. Its a great system. But I have a feeling that buying a P67 LGA1155 setup will allow for upgrading to Ivy Bridge, 22nm process, later this year where LGA1366 is probably going to hit a dead end.

Its a lot like AM3/AM3+/ While AM3 is not a bad system and allows to use AM2+ CPUs, you can't get BD for it due to the features AMD wanted to put into BD.

 

[scurbdog]

I refused the shipment of both the motherboard(fedex), then the CPU(UPS). The other parts I've had, buying slowly looks like this. The only loser looks to be the 6 gig of corsair 1600 ram I was gonna use for triple channel memory. Anyway, here is the list.

Corsair 600T Case-143.00 presale from Amazon

Corsair 650 psu- 60.00 AR Amazon

Corsair 6gig 1600 ram- 60.00 Newegg

Sony DVD/RW 16.00- Newegg

Hitachi 7200 1tb HDD- 45.00 Amazon

Sansung 5400 2tb HDD- 65.00 Newegg

Galaxy GTX460 768mb 93.00 AR- Tiger Direct

Sent back Gigabyte UDR3 and i7-950 after impulse buying it this past Saturday night lol.

Waiting for SB availability from Amazon to save on tax.

 

[beanoslim]

I've just brought an i7 950 setup for a good price, still a great setup Sandy or no Sandy.

 

[scurbdog]

Best answer selected by scurbdog.