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Intel Targets AMD With Affordable Unlocked CPUs
EconolineCrush writes "For years, AMD has catered to gamers and enthusiasts with mid-range Black Edition processors whose unlocked multipliers make overclocking easy. Intel has traditionally reserved unlocked multipliers for its ultra-expensive Extreme CPUs, but it has now brought the feature to affordable models that compete directly with AMD's most popular processors. The Core i5-655K and Core i7-875K have two and four cores, respectively, and they're priced at just $216 and $342. It appears that both will easily hit speeds in excess of 4GHz with air cooling. Surprisingly, even at stock speeds, the i7-875K offers better performance and power efficiency per dollar than just about any other desktop CPU out there."
What do you expect? It's a kdawson submission. You know: the submissions that always plain incorrect or just total garbage
"just $216 and $342"?
The majority of regular users can get by with just about any modern processor on the market today. Just glancing at Newegg, single core CPU's are starting at $32. Dual cores at $50. Quad cores at $81. I personally haven't spent more than $100 on a processor in ages, and I'm more or less a power user (do heavy programming and video encoding as well as other such tasks on my systems).
Now, at work, for servers, and I'm sure other users who are doing things like heavy graphics editing and such, people do need faster processors, but the people doing such tasks are NOT going to give two shits whether or not the multiplier is unlocked (anybody using an overclocked processor in a professional environment is just asking for trouble).
So you're left with the absolute hardcore hardware enthusiast market. Even in this market though you're going to have the "I'm poor and don't want to spend much" people who are still going for the low cost ones and trying to push them, and the "I've got money to blow and want the fastest available" people who were likely buying the really, really expensive stuff already.
In short, I just don't see this feature, at the stated price points, as really having much of a market.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
"Enthusiasts" are people with more money than sense. Why would anyone pay more than $150 for a CPU these days? A quad-core 3.0Ghz chip is not going to be your bottleneck. Yeah, I guess if you spend all day ripping and encoding video then that extra 10%-20% might amount to a few minutes saved, but for most people spending the extra $150 on an SSD drive instead would give them a far more noticeable performance boost.
Or, if you've still got money to burn, buy a nicer monitor-- or a second one, for that matter. Or some quality case fans that don't make your case sound like a jet engine. Or a decent set of speakers.
The obsession with CPU "speed" is dumb.
At the $200 price point, AMD is still killing it. Look at the scatter plot, and note what happens on the $200 line. Now, draw an imaginary $100 line, and check that out. It's all AMD. So while you may want to buy intel if you want today's fastest gaming machine, AMD is still the processor for those of us who want performance and money at the same time.
With that said, can anyone recommend a good AM3 air cooler that's not too spendy? I have a PhII X3 720 retail black edition that I'd like to overclock. The stock cooler won't cut it :) But I want to keep my budget very small, which is why I went AMD in the first place. So far, so good.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
for once, quite accurate by the anon. Reviews about these have been inconsistent, some citing bad overclocking potential and generally being not for enthusiasts.
Meanwhile, others seem to state it's a full sweep and/or basically great .
I'm wondering if this is another scenario of handpicked engineering samples or not.
I'm not at all convinced that this is great, or horrible. Anyone care to weigh in with better comments than kdawson?
Yes, faster is always better.
What we learned is that high GHZ don't necessarily imply a chip is faster.
In any overclocking scenario results aren't assured(though, at certain historical moments, they very nearly have been for certain chips). It isn't a huge surprise that there is some variability being seen; but the small sample size(maybe a dozen review sites, with a chip or two each) doesn't let us say too much).
The only thing that would be really sleazy would be if the review processors "just happened" to perform atypically well compared to the ones that poor saps can actually buy. Since, though, the mixed reviews are coming from reviewers, that seems less likely, and that these chips are simply spotty overclockers more likely(unless, of course, some of the reviewers are reviewing "representative samples" kindly provided by Intel, and others are reviewing representative samples scored from somewhere in the distribution chain.
The fact that a chip only sometimes outperforms its sticker speed is irksome for the overclocker; but not a big deal. If Intel is feeding handpicks to the reviewers, that sucks.
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I count 28 of them on my keyboard.
Well, thats why I want to know. It's not at all unknown for them to handpick the samples. I remember some recent controversy about this with somebody, I forgot if it was Nvidia, AMD, or Intel, or all of them in general.
The sites with the great results seem to say "this kick ass", and the ones without are meh, so it doesn't seem to be indicative of whether this processor is even worth it or not, all things taken into consideration.
Car analogy: Every car comes from the factory tuned in a conservative manner regarding air/fuel mixture, spark advance.....even torque management and shift pressures/points (in the case of automatics) You are able to change these values for a greater increase in performance or fuel economy. This change (when pushed to the limit or performed incorrectly) can be risky and put extra strain on components of your vehicle.