Good day fellows and felloettes,
I am getting close to placing an order for a nice shiny new toy to replace my aging AMD64 3500+ (45 seconds 1M PI woot!), and would like a little advice on the CPU choice please.
Obviously! the CPU of choice is Conroe at the moment, and my morality gauge won't let me buy the X6800 (despite the heart saying do it), which leaves the E6600 or E6700. Now there has been several threads about is the £150 extra worth it for the E6700, to which the replies have generally been "no". However...
The only differences I have discerned between the two are:
(1) Higher clock multiplier on the E6700 (10x vs 9x), which given the same standard FSB leads to a high core frequency on the E6700
(2) A few characters on top of the IHS
Both chips are rated as having a thermal output of 65w at standard clock speeds.
Now in the old days before the clock multipliers were locked into the chips (yes the OLD days), I was under the impression that the CPU manufacturer produced a job lot of chips, and speed tested a sample, assumed that the whole batch was roughly the same as the tested sample, and marked the CPU with an appropriate speed. Now assuming the same speed binning occurs now, (presumably on the core die without the surrounding CPU packaging and hence unlocked multiplier), do people think the E6700s are likely to be the "better" chips, capable of being clocked higher on average than the E6600s? If so, then I extra cash might be worthwhile (its only £150 after all, not a vast remortgage needing sum!), as system stability to me is more important than overall speed.
Also I'm a bit confused as to what clock speeds people are getting their conroes up to without changing vcore? I'm going to be putting this chip into a fairly serious water cooled setup (a nice big mountainmods case with a thermochill PA120.3 rad, LAING D5 pump cooling the CPU and Graphics card, a X1900XT-X using DangerDen blocks, all on 1/2" pipe). I'm against upping the voltage on the grounds that I don't want to damage the chip or greatly increase powerconsumption), also it seems to be that the motherboards FSB is the limiting factor in many cases not the Conroe? Again, if this is the case then the E6700 makes more sense again given its higher multiplier?
Could I expect to get 320Mhz FSB giving 3.2Ghz CPU speed on the E6700 and have a rock solid system?
Thanks in advance for any replies!
I am getting close to placing an order for a nice shiny new toy to replace my aging AMD64 3500+ (45 seconds 1M PI woot!), and would like a little advice on the CPU choice please.
Obviously! the CPU of choice is Conroe at the moment, and my morality gauge won't let me buy the X6800 (despite the heart saying do it), which leaves the E6600 or E6700. Now there has been several threads about is the £150 extra worth it for the E6700, to which the replies have generally been "no". However...
The only differences I have discerned between the two are:
(1) Higher clock multiplier on the E6700 (10x vs 9x), which given the same standard FSB leads to a high core frequency on the E6700
(2) A few characters on top of the IHS
Both chips are rated as having a thermal output of 65w at standard clock speeds.
Now in the old days before the clock multipliers were locked into the chips (yes the OLD days), I was under the impression that the CPU manufacturer produced a job lot of chips, and speed tested a sample, assumed that the whole batch was roughly the same as the tested sample, and marked the CPU with an appropriate speed. Now assuming the same speed binning occurs now, (presumably on the core die without the surrounding CPU packaging and hence unlocked multiplier), do people think the E6700s are likely to be the "better" chips, capable of being clocked higher on average than the E6600s? If so, then I extra cash might be worthwhile (its only £150 after all, not a vast remortgage needing sum!), as system stability to me is more important than overall speed.
Also I'm a bit confused as to what clock speeds people are getting their conroes up to without changing vcore? I'm going to be putting this chip into a fairly serious water cooled setup (a nice big mountainmods case with a thermochill PA120.3 rad, LAING D5 pump cooling the CPU and Graphics card, a X1900XT-X using DangerDen blocks, all on 1/2" pipe). I'm against upping the voltage on the grounds that I don't want to damage the chip or greatly increase powerconsumption), also it seems to be that the motherboards FSB is the limiting factor in many cases not the Conroe? Again, if this is the case then the E6700 makes more sense again given its higher multiplier?
Could I expect to get 320Mhz FSB giving 3.2Ghz CPU speed on the E6700 and have a rock solid system?
Thanks in advance for any replies!
