Is Intel Gonna Screw Us With The LGA 2011 CPUs?

binoyski

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And how about the X68 chipset? Will we be again restricted to a dual x8 mode in sli/crossfire? I'm planning on running 3x24 monitor setup by tri sli/crossfire which will be bottlenecked at higher resolutions. I wish they go with 16x 16x 8x, or better yet all 3 16x pcie. I could have build a 1155rig w/ AsusM4E but I would like to use a discrete soundcard, as I don't like the integrated one.
 
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.
 

kinth

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the high end are usually fine, intel seems to have taken a leaf out of amds book with regards to oc'ing and seem to be getting more relaxed about it all. who knows maybe one day no cpu's will be locked :)
 

jprahman

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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.
 

kinth

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^+1

i agree and when i say relaxed i mean they actually have some sort of unlocked chip these days which is relaxed for intel :p

when people are paying out the nose for a cpu though they should be able to do what they want with it. but i guess intel wants to make *** loads of money and they know as long as they have the enthusiast market they won't have to change.
 

silky salamandr

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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.

 

g00fysmiley

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i hate when people do this... even if lga 2011 beats 1155, is somehow magically even cheaper than lg1155 and out preforms it... lg1155 is STILL going to be a good mobo/cpu, it is SILL going to last you for many years, it is STILL going to with the right gpu max out all games out right now so no nobody is getting skrewed..

its just technology evolving, every improvment is a good thing, if you want to keep stuff that lasts and goes up in value with age get into antiques and collecting baseball cards or something ... if you're into computers you should WELCOME change and improvment
 

jprahman

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I'm talking about people building $700 gaming machines and want to save money on a CPU so they can spend enough money on graphics and other components. I don't mind the prices on Sandy Bridge CPUs personally, its just anybody that wants a bottom level gaming system that Sandy Bridge doesn't offer a lot of options. That's where AMD comes in.

As to LGA2011 being more easily overclocked I didn't make it clear enough. What I meant is that it's more "accessible" because you don't have to buy a CPU with an unlocked multiplier to overclock. You have a greater level of flexibility, but obviously it's going to be pricey. The multiplier unlocked LGA 1155 CPUs are easier to overclock, but you're stuck having to use a multiplier unlocked CPUs only.

And believe me, I'm very happy that Intel took a hint from AMD and released multiplier unlocked CPUs, it's just a shame they only did it at the higher end and took away budget overclocking.
 


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.
 

jprahman

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Bragging rights. lol. Seriously if you're running like 3 or more video cards, or want 8 cores for rendering, video transcoding, photo and video editing and other things like that LGA 2011 would be worth it.
 
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.
 
It's all about ROI. As you go for that last bit of performance, you suffer the law of diminishing returns. The cost ratio of the top CPU to the 2nd best is always much larger than their relative performance....the top video card that gets you 10% more performance, is not going to cost 10 % more .... it's always going to cost 50% more.

Same thing here ....the general consensus a year ago was that the impact of x16 x16 over x8 x8 was about 2%. Today's top end cards are faster than a year ago. However, when a x16 x16 P67 MoBo is $30 more than a x8 x8 one, that's an increase of 1.5% on a $2k system. So can ya argue that it's foolish to pay 1.5% more for a system to go 2% faster ? I can't.

 


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/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131694

I'm planning on running 3x24 monitor setup by tri sli/crossfire which will be bottlenecked at higher resolutions. I wish they go with 16x 16x 8x, or better yet all 3 16x pcie. I could have build a 1155rig w/ AsusM4E but I would like to use a discrete soundcard, as I don't like the integrated one.

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/radeon-hd-6850-6870-crossfirex-review/15

The one recommendation we always gave you guys is to keep it simple at 2 GPUs maximum, as after 2 GPUs in a CrossfireX setup you quickly run into weird anomalies that can be irritating.....

So over the years Multi-GPU support has improved quite a bit, AMD still isn't up-to snuff at the level of NVIDIA though, multi-GPU supports still literally and directly remains the Achilles heel of ATI's Catalyst drivers. .....

It's like this with ATI, once you pass 2 GPUs you'll often find yourself compromising a lot with new game titles versus multi-GPU support.
 
Jimmy. 2011 will have quad channel memory and have a max memory bandwidth of 56gb/s

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.
 
They have taken away that option of buying a cheaper chip then overclock the *** out of it for a big performance gain. Now you buy the unlocked one there's no need to OC it its a faster design which already runs past 3.2ghz and boost itself till 3.8Ghz. So the days of the E5200 are over until gigabytes find away to circumvent it......

They didn't just take it away. They had to. Integrating the PCIe, SATA and a whole slew of other controllers meant they would be tied to the BCLK which is set to 100MHz. If AMD dos the same, they will have the same in terms of OCing ability by only having unlocked multiplier versions which I would assume might be why they are planning FX versions for Bulldozer.
 

jprahman

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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.
 
Could they have? Yes. It would be more expensive though, and potentially more power hungry. Intel made the decision to lower costs and reduce power at the price of bclk overclocking, and honestly, I can't blame them. For the vast, vast majority of their market, they made the right choice.
 
Oh ok thought it was the mainstream version because the 965 extreme edition was the high the end one which you could mess with the individual turbo settings.
Well, it was the most mainstream of the 1366 offerings. 1156 was more of the mainstream socket for Nehalem though.

(And yes, you're right - the 965 was the only fully unlocked one)
 

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