The Bloomfields reviews are out, and if most of you look upon them with an unbiased, unhyped eye, you now have a new reason to buy a Penryn.
Unless you run a render farm, or media encoding is your life, you’re not going to get much more out of a Bloomfield than you will from a Penryn. For the moment at least, it looks like if you’re the OCing type, whatever extra you do get you’ll mostly give back because the Bloomfield won’t overclock as much.
That’s hardly great news, but the really bad news is that it looks like you’ll pay a good deal more for a Bloomfield package than a Penryn package. While DDR3 prices have gotten better, x58 mobo prices haven’t.
That’s why these Bloomfields remind me of Vista. OK, you buy it, you make the additional purchases needed because it obsoletes what you have. What more do you get for all the money you just laid out? Most of the time, for most reading this, the answer is going to be, “Not much.”
If this were just a matter of “wait until the prices go down,” you wouldn’t be hearing this, but remember, this is Intel’s attempt to establish a luxury brand, so the prices aren’t going to go down much. If any price is going to go down any time soon, it’s going to be the price of the Penryns.
Do yourself a favor. Wait a bit. Let the pioneers play with this equipment a bit and see if these chips, especially the 920, have been hobbled a bit OCing-wise. When you feel you need to buy, configure two systems (and maybe three if you wait long enough and want to give AMD a chance). See what the price difference is, see what you get for your extra money, see how you could improve the Penryn/Deneb system with the money you save, then seriously ask yourself, “Is it worth the extra money?” If the answer is still “Yes,” ask yourself “Why?” and if the answer boils down to “My ego,” tell your inner child “No,” and buy the Penryn or AMD system.
Times are likely to be a little rough the next year or two, so it’s a good time to practice a little fiscal discipline if you aren’t already, and this is a good place to start. Might send Intel a message, too.
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