Ok, I am a newb to this and its my first build so forgive the question but older boards are running tripple channel DDR3 memory but the new Sandybridge is only running Dual channel DDR3 from what i can see??
The older triple channel kit you are referring to are the LGA 1366 boards/CPUs. These are technically still the top-end boards and CPUs from Intel and they don't get a replacement until autumn.
The Sandy Bridge CPUs/boards we just had released replace the "mainstream" level LGA 1156 boards and CPUs, which were dual channel. Hence these new boards are dual channel too.
However, in real-world performance Dual channel DDR3 is more than fast enough, so triple channel DDR3 may have more bandwidth available - but it isn't made use of.
Is it still faster than the old?
Well the CPUs are a fair bit faster. Have a read of
this review and see how the new CPUs compare to the older i7s in a range of tasks.
I thought hyperthreading gave effectivley 6 cores on tripple channel??
No - these are two very different things.
Hyperthreading is not linked to the memory - it is a CPU technology and will work even if you are just running dual or single channel memory.
Hyperthreading produces two threads (or logical cores) per physical core. So a quad core i7 will run eight threads. However, this does not mean that performance doubles. In CPU-heavy multithreaded tasks a hyperthreaded CPU can be up to 25% faster than an identical CPU with hyperthreading disabled. However it is usually less than this. In applications that don't use more than four threads (like the vast majority of games) hyperthreading provides no performance benefit.
Yes - Sandy Bridge CPUs and boards that support triple channel memory (and quad channel supposedly) are coming out in Q3. However, unless you are running stuff that is particularly memory heavy then I wouldn't suggest waiting based purely on the higher maximum memory bandwidth offered by these new chips.
