Panther Point... or Cougar Point?

The Halk

The Halk

The Halk

Soldato
Joined
13 May 2003
Posts
11,865
Location
Hamilton
I've been waiting to do an upgrade to grab an Ivy Bridge. Having looked at all the options and being clear on what the performance will be ahead of time it seems to be the right option (of course I'll wait for reviews to crystallise that!).

However I'm not sure if Panther Point is worth it. Usually new platform motherboards have a bit of a price boost at launch, and if a Cougar Point would do the same job then I'm not worried.

Panther brings integrated USB3 support.. which doesn't bother me...

Anyone know what else is in Panther Point to make it worth the extra money?
 
The integrated USB3 seems the only major difference, other than supporting Ivy Bridge out of the box without having to mess around with updating the bios.

Personally just going to wait & see what is better value for money. Once z77 comes out, z68 may to get some sort of price drop. Also z77 may or may not have a PCI slot.
 
That means there's really no compelling reason to upgrade. I don't use a PCI slot any more, and as I said USB3 isn't an issue.

If there's power efficiency in it then that won't make it worth it either, even if it's going to save me 30 in leccy over a couple of years there will be that size of premium over the sandy bridge boards.

Stability is my main concern though, but I don't know of any real way to find what's going to be stable ahead of time. My current Crosshair IV board doesn't resume from S3 sleep 1/4 times if I enable it, so it's set to S1. It also crashes once every couple of weeks... and sadly I can't seem to pin it down.

Overlclocking isn't much of an issue either, I rarely overclock these days and generally the better boards only get a hundred or so megahertz out of a CPU than a standard board.

I'm half tempted to go for a very basic board, and cut down on the feature bloat.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom