Decisions decisions

[Sleinous]

So as some of you may know already, after receiving a very generous donation of 3x GTX 260 SSC for my folding endeavours I started to seriously struggle for space to slot in all my GPUs considering I already had a GTX 580, GTX 550 Ti and 2x 9800 GT in my main PCS rig!

Since my PCS rig I built another P67 rig for the family and chucked 2 of the GTX 260 SSC's in it for folding, no SLI enabled obviously & placed the last GTX 260 SSC in my main rig (nVidia 9800 GT died in a folding contest).

But now i've been offered a number of GTX 275's 260's 9800 GT's etc for a steal of a deal including another X58 motherboard, so my problem is I need to figure out what I should do in terms of CPU.

I've been offered an i7 930 never oc'd for a very cheap price too, but my question is, what's everyone's opinions on the i7 970 dropping into the £280-300 price range anytime soon? I know it's already fallen victim to quite a serious price cut with the launch of the 990X, and now the 995X is launching i'm not sure if it will drop anymore or if the next price drop will come with Z68 and socket 2011?

The need to predict what's going to happen lies in my choice on CPU for this second X58 board, as if they are set to drop i'll probably move my 930 over to this X58 board and chuck a 970 in my main rig.

Any speculations, educated guesses, insider intel (pun intended) welcome!

 

[pez]

Honest answer, is I have no idea

However, I would suggest maybe have a competition for one of them on the forums. Certainly spice things up a little

I would deliberate whilst munching on the enclosed cookie

 

[Sleinous]

Honest answer, is I have no idea

However, I would suggest maybe have a competition for one of them on the forums. Certainly spice things up a little

I would deliberate whilst munching on the enclosed cookie

Haha you cheeky devil! But I will mucnh on that cookie! Om nom nom

 

[Tom DWC]

My advice would be to buy AMD.

Nah seriously though I would say yeah, there's a chance of it dropping further later on this year following Intel's next release. Whether or not it actually will, well, who knows such things. Only Intel.

I guess it depends if you're prepared to wait until then to find out.

Wow that wasn't very helpful was it, sorry.


P.S

No, I haven't brought Minecraft yet. But I will.

 

[Sleinous]

You need to hurry up with teh mc buying! You know, I was tempted by the AMD 955BE build that was on offer too It did have one extra PCIex 16 slot as you saw!

 

[DeadEyeDuk]

Can we all (chocolate) chip in and say something generic, that we dont actually know, and its really up to Slei what he feels is right?

 

[Sleinous]

The more opinions the better! I need speculation and lots of it! Also any otther competition's chip releases that I may have missed would be interesting. I basically want to know what could push that 970 down and when.

E.g. take the bulldozer CPUs, I have no idea when they're out but I read in CustomPC that they could be quite good competition with the intel 6-cores, so im guessing that would also be a chip that (if sitll cheaper than a 970) could push it down a bit.

 

[pengipete]

You'll hate me for saying this but unless there is something confirmed with a guaranteed release date, full specs and very detailed information about real world performance, I'd suggest going with what's available and affordable. It's one of those situations where there will always be something around the corner that promises to be "better" and at some point you have to dive in - or you'll never buy anything.

It's like waiting for the next New and Improved wash-powder that promises to get your Y-fronts whiter - cos you know that's all you need to be able to pull. You can either sit at home in your dressing gown waiting for it to happen or you can get dressed and go to the pub - and actually meet someone.

If that's not enough - there's another downside to waiting for new tech and it can be summed up in two words....
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Sandy Bridge.

 

[Sleinous]

The i7 970 is old tech though and this is why I want it, old tech goes down in price and ill have a 2nd X58 mobo to fill up, so I will need SOME sort of X58 CPU and im thinking, well, why not go for an i7 970 instead of another i7 930?

For my folding endeavours the 12 threads will make a greater impact than 8 threads.

 

[pez]

What exactly is folding. I understand the basic concept, but what's it trying to achieve. As far as I can tell, it's getting people to spend money themselves, to create computers that uni's and science centers can't afford, and do their crunching for them?

 

[Sleinous]

Pretty much, although its modestly fun too, and, no one university would be able to fund teh entire F@H's computational power, which, in itself, makes relatively small of an indentation on the amount of work that is to be done! As for what it tries to achieve, its just simulating data, and send it back.

 

[Nemesis]

Its a competitive thing i think as well as a moral thing.....
Its called folding which is short for protein folding. These are simulations run by computers to help scientists understand diseases. Hmmmm watch this spot and ill bring up a link.....

Wiki (Protein folding) : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_folding
Wiki (Folding@home) : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@Home
Our teams website (Hint Hint.... numbers 193534) : http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=teampage&teamnum=193534
And heres a really easy to use client (Which i believe sleinous was first to recommend) : http://fahtracker.com/

 

[pez]

I may well have to dig out my old machine that blew up.
I think it's the PSU and it's modular 800w - so if anyone has anything spare floating around, happy to take it off your hands and get folding
It's got a half decent gfx and a quad core sitting in it - so should be good enough for this?

 

[Sleinous]

More than good as long as the gfx is an nvidia 8000 or up or an ATI, If it is an ATI ?AMD 5000 or 6000 series you can run the v7 beta client for GPU and get double the PPD you used to.

 

[DeadEyeDuk]

As I will be putting my Alienware downstairs for mum to use, I might kick that into Folding...once I manage to wipe the HDD and reset it to Factory Settgings...when I work out how to do that...hmm I sense a new thread coming!

DED

 

[pez]

I think it's the ATI 5350 or something. Was a good card and 3mths released when I got it 2 years ago.

 

[Sleinous]

GL Ded!

5350 is a low end card but will still produce some PPD especially with teh v7 beta client I mentioned

 

[pez]

Just checked. Worse than I thought Doctor. It's a cheeky little 4870 It worked well with MineSweeper however.

 

[DeadEyeDuk]

But I bet the fanspeed was at max and the temp around 115!

 

[pez]

Actually, it was very quiet. Ran the main 2 games I played quite happily, TF2 and CSS