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Sandy Bridge - Should I buy?

d3moliti0n

d3moliti0n

d3moliti0n

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Joined
11 Aug 2007
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1,666
Well I will have around £290 to spend on Monday on upgrades, I recently bought a PSU (BeQuiet L7 530W), 4GB DDR3 (Corsair XMS3 1600MHz) memory and a 1TB HDD (Samsung SpinPoint F3, 7200RPM).

My question is, is it worth buying a Sandy Bridge with that amount of money to spend? As basically I need a CPU, motherboard and some other non-essentials eg. I could do with a new DVD-RW as my current one has been playing up for a while now, I could do with a new keyboard/mouse as they are also getting on a bit and I have been thinking about getting an SSD for Windows installation on my new setup.

Do you think I should blow the £290 on a Sandy Bridge CPU/mobo or should I go for one of the other (cheaper, as I would want the i5-2500K) chips and use the rest for the other items? I'm not really sure which is why I'm asking for some opinions.

Oh, and it's essentially a new build as I'm only keeping my graphics card (Point of View GTX 260, 216 core, 896MB Exo edition) and case from my current setup.
 
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If you're buying now, why not?

I'm upgrading from a Q6600... was going to go with an I5 760, but figured the extra notes for new tech is the better option. Faster performance, new socket too... Seems most logical.
 
Dark_Angel said:
If you're buying now, why not?

I'm upgrading from a Q6600... was going to go with an I5 760, but figured the extra notes for new tech is the better option. Faster performance, new socket too... Seems most logical.
Click to expand...

Am I right in saying that Ivy Bridge will be using the same socket? If so that would be rather nice being about to drop in one of those CPU's once they are released...
 
Apparently, they're different sockets.

But, the thing of it is... you can always wait. Ivy Bridge isn't released yet... and won't be for about a year. You can always sell these parts if needed.
 
Do I need a specific type of motherboard to overclock the CPU? As I'm not sure where it stands with overclocking as I read a post earlier saying the cheaper Sandy Bridge motherboards won't let you overclock, then the next price up will let you overclock to a certain extent or something, I'm not sure.

So yeah, what's the cheapest motherboard option that would let me OC the CPU? Bearing in mind I am only overclocking it for gaming, I don't really do benchmarks etc.
 
Dark_Angel said:
Apparently, they're different sockets.

But, the thing of it is... you can always wait. Ivy Bridge isn't released yet... and won't be for about a year. You can always sell these parts if needed.
Click to expand...
Thanks, I think I'll wait. Changing motherboards is such a Pain.

I really like S775 as I could go from a 65nm e4300 to a 45nm e5300, while still keeping the same motherboard, so much easier!
 
Dark_Angel said:
Which means little considering he's going to be using a dedicated graphics card for games anyway...
Click to expand...

It doesn't change the fact that one of the new selling points of the Sandy Bridge Core i5 processors seems to be broken with the P67 motherboards. It is not like the P67 based motherboards are cheap either as they start at around £80 to £90.

This means if the OP does not want to overclock they need to get an H67 motherboard. If they want to overclock then they might as well wait for the Z68 chipset.
 
It's stupid... but meh.

There hasn't ever been a perfect release, and the new boards will fix the issues for people who need everything.

Me personally, I couldn't care less. My GTX 480 will do it fine.
 
Dark_Angel said:
It's stupid... but meh.

There hasn't ever been a perfect release, and the new boards will fix the issues for people who need everything.

Me personally, I couldn't care less. My GTX 480 will do it fine.
Click to expand...

It seems that Quick Sync runs faster than even using a GTX570 and CUDA:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/sandy-bridge-core-i7-2600k-core-i5-2500k,2833-5.html

TBH,I am quite surprised about this! Hopefully,the software packages used need further optimisation with AMD and Nvidia graphics cards.
 
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