what is the difference between

Intel 1366pin Core i7-950 and

Intel 1156pin Core i7-870 ?

I reckon Intel might.

Edit: aww now you've added stuff.

But doesn't the intel site give a comparison of all that jazz?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Core_i7

How hard was that

Dunno if it will save the selection results but

http://ark.intel.com/Compare.aspx?ids=41315,37150,

last edited by HerbalLizard at 15:17:10 22/Sep/09

if someone could just post a sweet one line answer that means i dont have to read a giant wall of s*** that would be great

Well one has 210 more pins than the other.

S1366 CPUs use triple-channel memory - that's where the extra pins come in. 1156 is dual-channel.

Also, see Wikipedia.

what is the difference between

Intel 1366pin Core i7-950 and

Intel 1156pin Core i7-870 ?

About $51 at Umart.

I liked the days when you saw that one CPU was 200mhz and one is 233mhz you could guess which one was better.

Now buying a CPU is like trying to pick a mobile phone plan, or figuring out which method of buying bundaberg rum premixes is the most cost-effective.

last edited by thermite at 15:21:32 22/Sep/09

In short the 950 uses more juice supports more ram but doesn't support 1333 ddr3 but has a higher clock speed and uses a different socket to the 870

cheers

seems the price difference is in the mobo and ram really hmm

e: also explains why they sell 6gb ram kits

last edited by d[o_0]b at 15:25:35 22/Sep/09

^ and I started my commercial software development career programming Honeywell Minicomputers with 128kb of ram using GCOS6 Assembler and COBOL and Apple // with 48kb using 6502 Assembler and Applesoft Basic.

The luxuries of ram and power today today. I will say one thing, we sure learnt how to right tight code back then. Sometimes you had only 16 bytes to right a string manipulation routine in 6502 Assembler and had to poke it into an available location to reference it directly by address.

A month or two ago people kept saying "don't buy a 9xx series, wait for 8xx". Well, whatever. I didn't want to wait for the release, not to mention not wanting to "beta test" the first batch of 1156 motherboards. The 1366s have been around long enough to trust stability.

So I went and got myself an i7 920 ($380) with 12GB (6x2GB) 1600MHz Corsair RAM ($325) in triple channel, 4 drives in RAID 0+1. That combination of CPU, ram and RAID completely dominates almost every task that I throw at it. In terms of multi-threaded number crunching performance, the tasks run at 3-3.7x the speed of my dual-core E6600.

To be honest the 950/870 seem a waste of money over the 920/860?

last edited by parabol at 15:39:43 22/Sep/09

holy s*** you could do the special effects for transformers 2 on that setup.

what the f*** do you do that needs 12gig of ram?

On that raid thing, I'm a raid newb, can I have 3 drives striped for more performance or if I have 2 striped & add another it'll be a parity check on the 3rd or does it all depend on the type of raid config you select?

Say I wanted ultra fast awesome loading of cs so I could be in the map before everyone else*** I could have 3 or 4 drives all striped or is stripe a max of 2 drives? I'm so newb I don't even know what number stripe is, 0?

***Not actually the reason I want uber fast load speeds.

what the f*** do you do that needs 12gig of ram?

Direct use of 12GB: Finite Element simulations for uni research, plus virtual machines (I use them daily).

Indirect use of 12GB: Windows keeps many of my programs in memory after use. So on the next run it loads up instantly. Vista additionally does prefetching, putting things in memory based on my daily/nightly usage patterns. So yes, for example later on in the day if I launch Photoshop CS4, it loads in 2 seconds flat.

On that raid thing, I'm a raid newb, can I have 3 drives striped for more performance or if I have 2 striped & add another it'll be a parity check on the 3rd or does it all depend on the type of raid config you select?

You chose the RAID type, and designate the required (or preferred) number of drives to the array. The controller generally takes care of the details.

I did a fair bit of research into motherboard (onboard) RAID support. RAID5 can theoretically give you a huge boost but certain types of operations slow it down to a crawl - not to mention huge CPU usage. It's recommended to have a dedicated card for it (expensive!). Plus if a drive fails or falls out of RAID, it'll take an insane amount of time to rebuild RAID-5 with an onboard controller due to the parity calculations.

I went with onboard Intel RAID 0+1 (which Intel incorrectly labels as "RAID 10"). If you read on Wikipedia, it'll tell you 0+1 is less reliable than RAID 1+0, but for a 4-drive setup on the same controller it's pretty much identical to RAID 1+0 in performance and reliability (i.e. roughly RAID-1 reliability with RAID-0 performance). It's very simple compared to RAID-5 and rebuilding is much faster.

I got 4x 500GB WD blue drives ($67) each. RAID 0+1'd it with onboard controller, giving a total usable space of 1TB.

Here's a typical read speed benchmark. Small dips in performance are due to unwanted background disk usage interrupting the benchmark:

http://homepage.powerup.com.au/~boldajis/images/raid0 1_better.png

last edited by parabol at 19:47:11 22/Sep/09

In one of the new PC Powerplays or Atomic they did a review on memory and said our current machines don't use more than 6gig, if that. So having more is pretty much a waste and it will never be used.

But in saying that it can never hurt to have a s***load of it.

8-)

Intel 1156pin Core i7-870 ?

Isn't it called an i5 if it's on LGA1156?

But yeah, the triple channel/dual channel thing is true. I don't put much stock in triple channel though... You won't actually notice a difference unless you benchmark or actually time things. It also depends heavily on what you do.

Actually the remaining 6 gig could be made into a ram-drive and then you could load your cs maps almost instantaneously hahaha.

In one of the new PC Powerplays or Atomic they did a review on memory and said our current machines don't use more than 6gig, if that.

And that is a prime example why most "advice" from magazines should be ignored. What the hell is a "current machine" anyway?

If you've just got IE and MS Word open, or just running a game then of course you're very unlikely to go over. If you're doing something like image/video editing, scientific computation, software development then RAM shortage quickly becomes an issue.

So having more is pretty much a waste and it will never be used.

Untrue. As I've already mentioned, unused RAM gets used up by disk cache (and/or pre-fetching) depending on the OS. So stuff that was recently used or is likely to later be loaded from disk is actually sitting in uber-fast RAM waiting to be used again - at very little cost (i.e. if a program legitimately needs the RAM, the OS will purge the cache data instantly).

Since RAM is much faster than a hdd, you'll get a huge boost in performance for frequently-run programs (and the supporting OS libraries, which will speed up the overall system). It's interesting how people will splash down $300-600 on a Raptor or SSD, while ignoring the amount of RAM they get. Disk cache is severely under-rated.

So I went and got myself an i7 920 ($380) with 12GB (6x2GB) 1600MHz Corsair RAM ($325) in triple channel, 4 drives in RAID 0+1.

Minus the raid, I have the exact same specs. It's fantastic, and I'm glad I went with the 920 instead of waiting for the new cheaper i7s. My machine is a super-high-poly scuplting beast. I don't know how much of a difference the triple channel memory makes, but just have 12GB allows me to get up to around 120 million polygons in a mesh and still be able to sculpt.

I know this doesn't have much to do with the thread, I just wanted to brag.

ram-drive seriously hardly considered

i have 8gig in my media centre box, that just plays tvs and mp3s. ram is so cheap these days.

My brother's work machine has 24gig of ram and 8 cores. he only maxed the ram out twice so far tho.

1366 is more for the enthusiasts, people who are going to do SLI and / or need large amounts of RAM for their work.

1156 is aimed at the mainstream users.

Reckon it was a bad idea on intel's part to have Core i7's use both socket 1366 and 1156, just going to make things more confusing. Would have been better to say make all i5's use 1156 and all i7's use 1366. It's like c2d's, you know instantly that they all run on socket 775 or P4's on socket 478, it just makes things a bit simpler if you need to look for replacement parts down the track.

It's like c2d's, you know instantly that they all run on socket 775 or P4's on socket 478

P4's did also come in S775.

ended up getting the 860 with 8gb of ddr3 1600 patriot viper ram on an ASUS P7P55D Deluxe. Easily overclocked it to 140mhz straight off the bat. ASUS 4870x2 and gigabyte odin 1200w in a thermaltake Element S case. All i need now is the SSD and another samsung 24" screen :D

^ and I started my commercial software development career programming Honeywell Minicomputers with 128kb of ram using GCOS6 Assembler and COBOL and Apple // with 48kb using 6502 Assembler and Applesoft Basic.

The luxuries of ram and power today today. I will say one thing, we sure learnt how to right tight code back then. Sometimes you had only 16 bytes to right a string manipulation routine in 6502 Assembler and had to poke it into an available location to reference it directly by address.

Betcha had a s***load of errors to correct! ;-)