Questions about x58 processors

Hi, I traded my sabertooth 990fx w/960t x6 4.1ghz @1.392 for a rampage iii extreme with full board Ek block and the d0 920. I am looking at some of the better processors avail for that board an am wondering is a 970 or 980 OCd w/ minimal core increase going to be better than a 2nd or 3rd gen i5 OCd w/ minimal core increase? When I say minimal I mean that after turning on llc I actually had to reduce the voltage to get the lowest stable voltage @ 4.4GHz on my 2500k and thats the way I like to roll. I'll be rocking a 2x rad and apogee gt on the 1336 and I rock apogee hd quad rad on my 2500k.

I'd be willing to switch cases if the old x58 proves to be killer with one of the high end chips.

I only game but I have been seeing isolated incidents where a 970 went for less than $300 and my 920 is worth around $100 so maybe worth the upgrade? Or maybe even an extreme proc if I can land it for less than $350.

Not really sure what you just said but... I think the answer to your question is: No.

My question is will an OC'd 970 w/ tripple channel ram be better than an OCd 2500K with dual channel ram. If not then why on earth are these old 1366 processors still selling for $300-500 dollars and other models even more if the current gen double channel procs are better?

An i7 has 6 cores, so when doing multi-threaded tasks it should be quite a bit quicker.
Clock for clock though it is about 10% slower than the 2500k in tasks that are 4 threads or less though. There wasn't a huge increase in bandwidth going from dual channel to triple from what I can remember.

So it depends what you are using it for as to whether it will be faster. Also the core i7's on X58 will not overclock as far as Sandy Bridge CPUs, 4-4.3 GHz is probably what you can expect on the later stepping.

I had a 970 that clocked worse than some 920s, there were some 980s that needed as much vcore as my 970 did for 4ghz, wich was 1.35v. This one does 4.2 @ 1.3v. Some 970s were decent clockers, but the amount of them produced made it easy for intel to bin the best cores for the extremes and xeons. I traded my 970 and some cash for this xeon. My 970 had a very strong imc, much stronger than this one. But this clocks much much better, but am limited to about 1000mhz on the stix (ddr3 2000) whereas my 970 was able to do ddr3 2400, but not 24/7

I would take a 2500k over a 970 for gaming. TC ram doesn't matter because you will never max dual channel bandwidth in gaming.

Badbonji said:

An i7 has 6 cores, so when doing multi-threaded tasks it should be quite a bit quicker.
Clock for clock though it is about 10% slower than the 2500k in tasks that are 4 threads or less though. There wasn't a huge increase in bandwidth going from dual channel to triple from what I can remember.

So it depends what you are using it for as to whether it will be faster. Also the core i7's on X58 will not overclock as far as Sandy Bridge CPUs, 4-4.3 GHz is probably what you can expect on the later stepping.

Click to expand...

The majority of i7's have 4 physical and 4 virtual cores via HT.

eskimochaos said:

The majority of i7's have 4 physical and 4 virtual cores via HT.

Click to expand...

Indeed, but his question referred to the six core models with HT.

djscrew said:

I would take a 2500k over a 970 for gaming. TC ram doesn't matter because you will never max dual channel bandwidth in gaming.

Click to expand...

2nd gen i7 produce more bandwidth in dc than first gen tc. But, if you run f@h in tc, than do the same WU in dc, you will notice an impact in performance. I like my old 6 core, its still a beast, but the newer cpus dont chew nearly as much power as these dinosaurs do (AMD does now haha), no matter how fast you run em.

For gaming, very few games will run faster on the six core GT than the quad SB, given similar clocks.
The SB will almost certainly OC further.

Ram wise, there's a minimal difference in gaming use. In intensively RAM hungry activities the difference is larger, but the SB memory controller is much more efficient than the GT controller, so it balances out pretty decently.

X58 is grand fun to play with, but it's unlikely to beat SB stuff.