Is Intel Gonna Screw Us With The LGA 2011 CPUs?

Why would Intel restrict either overclocking or PCI-E lanes on their high end chipset?

Look at LGA1366 and X58 if you want to see what Intel does with the high end. They overclock like mad, and have more than enough PCI-E lanes to go around.

Intel is more relaxed about overclocking? That's totally not the case. Yes Intel is giving us unlocked chips, but the cheapest they offer costs $215. If you want to buy a cheap CPU for ~$150-$100 and overclock it to extract value then you get screwed because of the locked CPU multipliers and locked BCLK. Intel is only offering the unlocked SB CPUs because if they didn't there would have been a revolt because none of the SB CPUs could be overclocked.

I still think Sandy Bridge CPUs are quite good, but if you are a budget builder then your options for an Intel CPU are now severely limited with SB.

LGA 2011 sounds like it will be easier to overclock because from what I've heard the BCLK won't be tied to things like the SATA bus and PCIe bus so BCLK overclocking will be an option on LGA2011. I'm worried though that the entry level CPUs on LGA2011 are going to cost around $280 like they were with LGA1366.

LGA 2011 easier to overclock? People are consistantly getting 4.8 with just a mouse click on EFI BIOS and 5.2 without the easy overclock function. Hell I dont need my computer to levitate or become self aware, I just want some really good performance. The fastest Ive been on my I7-860 is 4.2 because Im limited to air but when Newegg finally gets the Asus Maximus Extreme back in, Ill be putting that I7-2600k under water.

Please explain the easier.

With LGA 1155 having great features on mobos, Im really interested to see what lga 2011 is going to do to make it "enthusiest". Having a full 16 lanes of pci express power has already been proven that you lose 2 to 5% that only shows up in benchmarks so a full 16 lanes means nothing to my sli set up.

So, It looks like Intel is going to use the 1155 socket for a bit. Am I correct. Because I really want to get the i7 2600K?

Actually The LGA2011, from what I can find, will be hosting 40 PCIe 3.0 lanes. One PCIe 3.0 x16 lane will be 2x as powerful as a single PCIe 2.0 lane, much like it takes a PCIe 1.0 x16 to equal a PCIe 2.0 x8 lane. So with 40 lanes you would run at x16/x16/x8 which would still give better bandwidth than a full x16/x16/x16 PCIe 2.0 setup.

Still there are no real GPUs out there that even tap the full bandwidth of a PCIe 1.0 x16 lane apart from dual GPU boards, even then. Hell LGA2011 is not even set to have Intel HD graphics. its set to be just the CPU itself.

As for overclocking, its hard to say. I am sure it will have the same setup as LGA1155, with all the parts being on die and tied to the BCLK but there will probably mainly be unlocked versions since high end is always known for overclocking.

As for discrete sound, you can always use a discrete card. Just disable the onboard in BIOS like I did when I got my Creative X-Fi.

The other advantage that LGA2011 will have is tri channel DDR3 so memory intensive applications will love it. Supposed to have something like 51GB/s bandwidth for memory due to it using QPI and the third channel instead of DMI 2.0 and dual channel. But other than memory loving applications, LGA1155 will probably be a good setup. Even with just x8/x8/x8 PCIe 2.0 it would be fine as there is pretty much no difference between that and full x16 PCIe 2.0 on current GPUs and probably wont be until a good while.

Hell AGP 8X was not even bottlenecking when PCIe 1.0 came out and probably didn't bottleneck until the nVidia 8 / ATI HD3K series really.

So unless your making the Incredibles 2 in your basement, why would you pay for lga 2011?

LGA2011 will have a quad channel variant. For the highe end desktop, basically LGA1366 replacement it will have tri but for the workstation and server market it will have quad channel plus 2x QPI instead of 1x QPI.

Of course its all rumored so we will have to wait for Intel to release official specs.

Because you can. Same reason why LGA1366 is pointless for almost everything but will probably last longer than LGA1156 in terms of performance later down the road due to higher bandwidth and faster PCIe lanes.

LGA2011 will be the same.

You not restricted on the 1155 can do x16 x16 SLI now with the 1155 as long as it has an NF200 chipset
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6813131694

With two cards, I'm pretty comfy with SLI or Xfire and today's cards from both camps are pretty well matched. At 3 cards, I'd stick w/ SLI.

http://www.guru3d.com/article/rade [...] -review/15

I know the memory bandwidth is supposed to be insane but have heard that there will be two configurations for LGA2011. One for the high end desktop utilizing 3 channels of DDR3 and one for the workstation and high end server with 4 channels of DDR3. I can understand as well since one will have 1x QPI and the other will have 2x QPI.

Of course I will wait for official news from Intel but its nice to speculate about those things unless you have a article.

I don't know a significant amount about electrical engineering, but couldn't they have integrated two BCLKs? One for the processor, RAM and other components that were based off of the BCLK in the past and another for SATA, PCIe and the other timing sensitive components. Again there may have been cost or technical concerns that prevented doing so that we don't know about, but doing that would have allowed for integration of those components while also allowing overclocking without requiring a multiplier unlocked CPU.

Yes, actually. Consider that the cheapest processor available for the platform was $300, and you needed a $200 board to go with it.

Remember, we are an almost insignificant portion of the market. But good performance trickles down to the mainstream market.

Try 5-8% for x16 to x8, or at least try reading the PCIe and CrossFire scaling article from like, 2009! Talk about outdated advice...

-1 for listening to someone who's clearly wrong by at least 13 months.

That's hardly a bandwidth-restricted game, try something with really big maps that need to be cached to RAM. The most bandwidth-challenging game in the year-old test was Far Cry 2, and I'm certain you could find a current title that has similarly complex distance rendering.

is this from the link you posted or from psyscho's link? because as far bandwidth is concerned farcry2 is not a very good test since most cards are scoring sufficient fps (above 60).

you guys are aware that you are comparing 2 different setups (1 is using a multi-gpu configuration from toms, the other is using a single card setup from tpu)

Tom's Hardware's test is inclusive, the link I pointed to was the 1-card test. The other half of the article is multi-card testing.

I would also imagine that having two BCLKs would increase latency and reduce performance overall. Having one BCLK means the CPU only has to look in one place to access everything instead of having to go to two places. Its a lot like Intels L3 cache that stores a copy of everything so the CPU doesn't have to check the L1 or L2 cache or even request it again from memory.

Not the same. Thats the server sockets. LGA1366 based Xeons only have one QPI link. LGA2011 is meant to be high end to extreme user and will have the ability to have two QPI links. I would imagine the server market might have more.

I am just going off of what I can find which is why I can't give it a 100%.

http://www.tomshardware.com/review [...] ,2695.html

Thats a article about it being out about summer this year which would probably coincide with Intels LGA2011 release.

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/c [...] -next-gen/

That details that LGA2011 should have 32lanes for PCIe 3.0 on the CPU itself. Of course its still early but hopeful as that would be a nice feature.

Here is an interesting article about Patsburg, X58s successor:

http://www.semiaccurate.com/2010/0 [...] surprises/

Still I wouldn't be suprised if Intel has PCIe 3.0 on LGA2011. They do tend to push new technology as fast as possible.

From what I have read on the official PCIe groups site, PCIe 3 will be backwards compatable so yea all 40 should support PCIe 2.0/ But I still wont be suprised if LGA2011 comes with at least 32 PCIe 3.0 lanes. Its been in testing since 2008 and back in Summer of 2010 they fixed the backwards compatability issue that was pretty much the largest setback of them all.

We will see though. Although I don't see any real use for PCIe 3.0 right now its the way the industry moves. By 2012, Intels Haswell CPUs will probably sport DDR4.

What about the 975? Or 980X?

LGA1366 Xeons can have two QPI links. http://ark.intel.com/Product.aspx?id=47920&processor=X5670&spec-codes=SLBV7

The whole point of 2x QPI is for dual processors, and as far as I know, is necessary for that. Those CPUs are probably for workstations rather than servers, mostly.

When I said "in higher resolutions" I meant 5670x1200 in a 6 monitor eyefinity setup or in a 3 monitor rig. I think I read a review here in TH or a different site(can't remember), that in very high resolutions dual x8 will be bottlenecked.

That's not necessarily true. If the round trip latency for a 128 byte read is 400ns, but the bus can service 1 of those calls every 10 ns, then the read bandwidth would be 95 Gb/s. Similarly, if the round trip latency for a 128 byte read is 400ns, and the bus can only serve one call every 400ns, but that call can be up to 1024 bytes, then the bandwidth would be 19 Gbps. You're making the mistake of assuming that every call is the full width of the bus, and that multiple calls cannot be occurring simultaneously.

Oh, and none of this has to do with the actual benchmarks, which show the gap between x16 and x8 decreasing with increasing resolution (at least from what I've seen).

Not going to upgrade until I see native USB3/SATA3, PCI-E 3.0 and quad-channel DDR4.

No, it has two. They kill the other link on Desktop processors so they can't be used in dual-CPU configurations on dual-socket server boards. You can however put the dual-socket CPU on a single-socket board.