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i7 2.66 or AMD 3.2??

+1

i7 if video encoding is important - although too many people waste money for 10 minutes a week of ripping DVDs...

i7 is still very much top-end hardware in performance and cost... it's better than cheaper C2Q or AMD kit, but it's also got a premium.

As said, i7 is very quick for video encoding, but you have to consider how much you actually do a week: for a professional, yes, for converting the occasional DVD you'll not get a lot out of it.
 
tbh, I have never used a quad amd chip. I would very much like to use one for a week to see, but I have never been impressed with any of the amd duals. they seem to have a natural pause here and there. I don't know, that's the best way I can describe it. Don't get me wrong they are way more legit than the p4's (which is what most in my fam's was using until I got them all amd duals.) My intel E2200 blows them all away though (athlon 64 x2's 5000 I think it's been a while)
 
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by the time a game comes out thats worth spending 1k on the hardware you may aswell save skinting yourself, buy a amd tri core 2.8 clock it to 3.5 in the bios stick in 8gb ddr2 ram and get either 1 295gtx or 2 4890 and crossfire them, i7 hardware requirements are expensive the mobo's are £200 upwards...
 
avatar12m said:
i7 hardware requirements are expensive the mobo's are £200 upwards...
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Rubbish.

i7 mobo's can be had for less than £150 from OCUK

The 920 is relatively cheap and certainly no more expensive than the top end S775 quads.

DDR3 is now very cheap. You can get G skill 3 GB kits for 28 quid and 6GB kits for 60.

X58 and i7 can go either Xfire or SLI too.
 
Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD3R Intel X58 (Socket 1366) PCI-Express DDR3 Motherboard

Hardly Entry level, why waste £60
 
I didn't see it as an insult. It's just that it's pretty much common knowledge that even the worse x58 board is still miles ahead of any 775/771 socket board. So your comment about an entry level x58 board made you seem like either you were a fanboy (which is okay) or you just didn't know much about the whole 1366 platform.
 
avatar12m said:
less of the insults please. i've got every right to air my views as do you.

thats why the forums public.
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There is airing views and posting mis-information.

I for one think its a pretty bad state of affairs posting mis-information like you did when some one is about to spend hundreds on PC hardware.
 
Ninja Please! said:
I didn't see it as an insult. It's just that it's pretty much common knowledge that even the worse x58 board is still miles ahead of any 775/771 socket board. So your comment about an entry level x58 board made you seem like either you were a fanboy (which is okay) or you just didn't know much about the whole 1366 platform.
Click to expand...

Exactly.

His post is nonesense and needs to be ignored.
 
Dr Who said:
Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD3R Intel X58 (Socket 1366) PCI-Express DDR3 Motherboard

Hardly Entry level, why waste £60
Click to expand...

I'm a big fan of that board as it's great in almost every way, though it's worth pointing out that it only has 4 RAM slots so go for 3x2GB straight away (although most people do anyway)
 
AMD Phenom II X3 Tri Core 720 Black Edition 2.8GHz £120
easily clocks to 3.5ghz low power consumption plus low temperature.

Asus M4A79T Deluxe AMD 790FX £135
top of the line chipset

OCZ Platinum AM3 4GB 1066mhz £48

TOTAL £303 :)

VS

Intel Core i7 920 D0 Stepping (SLBEJ) 2.66Ghz £216
Asus P6T Intel X58 £170
OCZ Gold 6GB (3x2GB) DDR3 PC3-10666C9 £70

TOTAL £456 :(

for games its clock speed that removes the bottleneck so with the change you could get a nice 4890 1gb.

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/dead-space-performance,review-31599-9.html

proves (albeit in 1 game) theres nothing in 4 core over the amd x3

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/phenom-ii-ddr3,review-31596-6.html

4fps difference in the slowest cheapest ddr3 ram to the fastest more expensive.

for me its also about performance/temp/noise/power consumption.

e.a.o.e.
 
Intel Core i7 920 2.66Ghz
Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD3R Intel X58
OCZ Gold 6GB (3x2GB) DDR3 PC3-10666C9 Low-Voltage Triple Channel

I can buy this from ocuk for:

£416.97

Faster
More ram
Xfire and SLI

And superior performance for just over 100 quid more.

The OP is just not playing games either.

Fact is £303 for your 3 core rig is hardly cheap.Considering you can get the latest tech for so little more that offers future expansion.


The OP has the budget so he should buy the best for his money.
 
Just out of curiosity for video encoding as I don't really do any, the nearest I get is with using movie maker to put tunes onto youtube every now & again takes me about 40 seconds or something daft.

How much time difference are we looking at in real world terms, I see all these benchmarks, but are we talking hours difference, minutes or seconds here for encoding say a full DVD?

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/cpus/2009/04/23/amd-phenom-ii-x4-955-black-edition-cpu-am3/8

From the above benchmarks were talking seconds, from that it makes me think h'mm is it really worth it, what difference is 30 seconds, 1 minute or 5 minutes going to make? maybe if its for work then yeah time is crucial 5 minutes less is 5 minutes gained.

Like I mentioned before, all I really do is play games so I'm more than happy with what I've got.
 
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