Core I7 950 vs Core I7 2600k

Well you'll pay about another $185 to $200 more to get into the i7 2600K and P8P67 Deluxe. Is it worth it? To me it was, cause that's exactly what I have waiting on me down at the UPS station if I can ever get out from under all this snow.  

1) With some fast DDR3, you'll be hanging out with the top dog i7 980x.

2) The EFI bios is way cool.

3) The diagnostic features alone on the board are worth it.

4) You'll be setting yourself up with some powerful OC features for now or in the future. The Pro version took top overclocking spot on TH reviews, and placed well everywhere else too. So the Deluxe is probably as fast or faster.

5) If you use Bluetooth, this is the board for you.

6) Too many other features to list.

If you can afford it, you'll be happier longer for the extra 190 or so.  

If you were just playing games then I would have spending the extra money for the i7 2600K would not be worth it.

However, if you are doing animation, then I would go for the i7 2600k.

No real gains in gaming (unless its really CPU intensive which very very few are)

Great gains in apps for rendering and such on par with the 980x which is the $1000 CPU. So yeh totally worth it for you.

Only downside is you can't make use of QuickSync on a P67 board have to wait for Z68 in Q2. Which decreases the time to transcode a video from one format to another much more quickly. Though I'm not sure if that also applies to encoding and may be limited to just h.264 which happens to be the popular compression rate atm. It's very limited in its purpose, but does it exceptionally well great for people that like to throw media onto their mobile devices or put it in a more manageable size for youtube.

You can overclock the hell out of the 950 to outperform the 2600K if you want to save some money, but getting the right motherboard so you can OC the 2600K will cream over everything else out there atm.

If you don't plan on overclocking, you can save some money and get the vanilla 2600 and it will stomp over everything except the 980X. In fact, even now I doubt Hyperthreading offers enough of a boost to be worth the cash, so you could even look at the 2500K (or 2500 if you're not overclocking) for some more savings.

I doubt you'd be using the onboard GPU anyway, so that's a non-issue.

Ya 4.8 on air at what voltage?

1.35 is the maximum vcore you should be using on SB for 24/7 use.

The only reason to go socket 1366 right now is for more ram you can easily do 24Gbs in 4GB dimms.

1155 can take a maximum of 32GB but good luck finding 8GB dimms for a reasonable price.


If you are building a system today it makes more sense to go with SB.

Forget about people pissing there pants over 5Ghz overclocks they are rare and most aren't 24/7 stable at a safe voltage.

this question has already been asked ill try to find the thread and link it