My new rig, and my thoughts on buying now instead of later.

[Engels]

So after playing Bioshock on my AMD box, I decided that I should probably buy the new parts for a new rig.

I'm gonna be reusing my old Antec Lan Boy, a couple of unused SATA 3.0 drives, an unused DVD R/W drive, so to upgrade all I need is a mobo, a cpu and some new ram. After quite a bit of hunting down pricing, benchmarks, advice on Anandtech & other locations, I came up with this 'budget' rig, which I think is going to do well. All pricing is from New Egg.

GIGABYTE GA-P35C-DS3R LGA 775 Intel P35 ATX Intel Motherboard - Retail
  $159.99 
Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 Conroe 2.66GHz LGA 775 Processor Model BX80557E6750 - Retail
  $204.99 
Thermaltake W0116RU Complies with ATX 12V 2.2 & EPS 12V version 750W Power Supply - Retail
  $184.99 
CORSAIR XMS2 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model TWIN2X2048-6400C4 - Retail
  $107.00
Total $616.97

Now, the ram can't be OC'd to 1066, and the processor isn't bleeding edge Quad core heaven, but I had to make some choices.

One of the things I'm going to have to upgrade in the near future is my video card, currently a 7950; its a gorgeous card, I love it, but it can't do DX10 shiney, and I want. So instead of getting a faster CPU, or 1066 ram (or DDR3 ram), I saved that cash to be able to get a Nvidia 8800GTX card down the line.

The thing I would love some imput on is the scalability of the motherboad. I've talked to a few folks who claim to be in the know, but it can't hurt to ask here; Its a p35 chipset board, which allegedly will support the new 45 nanometer processors (Penryn, I believe the name is?) coming out relatively soon. It also has support for DDR3 memory. I'm wondering if anyone has any experience, opinion or knowledge on the ability to upgrade processors on P35s, and furthermore, although I know that current DDR3 will work with this board, as bus speeds go up, do you think/know if these hybrid boards will support later, faster iterations of DDR3 ram?

Thanks for any input!

[cmlancas]

I need to get back into researching PCs and builds, I didn't even know DDR3 was out for system RAM yet. Fuck me.

Anyway, I'm still in the camp that thinks that QCs are too much shiny for not enough bang. It's nice to say you have one, but are you really using all of the CPU you could? I think money could be better spent on RAID configurations or nixing any other bottlenecks your system might have.

[Trippy]

If you are building with an eye towards the future you might want to wait for the X38 chipset.

[Engels]

You have a point regarding the x38, which I considered, but reading some stuff made me not worry about it too much. Benefits as summarised:

First of all, it will support PCI Express 2.0 standard and allow using several graphics cards in Crossfire configuration as “PCI Express x16 + PCI Express x16”. Secondly, Intel X38 chipset will unleash the DDR3 memory modules potential as it will support DDR3 memory with up to 1333MHz frequency ensuring compatibility with SPD extensions called XMP (Extreme Memory Profiles). Thirdly, mainboards on X38 will support special Extreme Tuning Utility for system overclocking.

Firstly, I'm not too crazy about SLI/ XFire type configurations. If I were into running Flight Sim X at full capacity, I would think on it, but right now, I think most stuff coming down the pipe will probably not cause a single 8800GTX to suffer too much. Secondly, current prices for DDR3 memory seem out of control. Perhaps they'll drop by the end of September, but I probably can't count on that. Lastly, I guess I'm not into xXTREME Tuning (tm) or overclocking chips. I've had bad luck with it, so perhaps I'm gunshy about it, but what few hertz I've been able to jack up into my current CPUs hasn't merited the accompanied system instability.

So, between the DDR3 prices , and the speculated pricing on the motherboards that'll work for gamers that want the usual ICH9R stuff, like raid, I suspect that right there, the cost will be at least $300 more than the rig I'm building above.

I guess I could wait till the x38 is released and then buy DDR2 memory and  P35 chip, but my experience with that is that prices for older stuff doesn't drop that quickly.

[Krakrok]

Anyway, I'm still in the camp that thinks that QCs are too much shiny for not enough bang. It's nice to say you have one, but are you really using all of the CPU you could? I think money could be better spent on RAID configurations or nixing any other bottlenecks your system might have.

I dunno, I was pretty glad I had a Q6600 this weekend when I had to process 44 video files (4:30 hours worth). The only thing I have been able to peg the CPU with so far has been Bryce 6 (raytracing). I had two WME9 sessions going plus a VirtualDub de-interlace session and it only took all cores to 70% or so. A single WME9 session only takes 25% from each core for some reason (hard drive bottleneck I expect). Illustrator and Premier Pro load up super fast as well.

With video processing I get bottlenecked by A) Hard Drive B) Gigabit Network C) Vista and D) me. I've benched the hard drive at 36MB/s and the Gigabit at 10MB/s (pathetic). Under Vista when I turn on Jumbo packets for the Gigabit it disables remote shares.

As far as gaming goes I've only played Dungeon Runners on it. If I remember right it used all 4 cores but one of the cores was at maybe 75% with another at 25% and the rest at 15%. The nVidia driver has a "use multithreaded CPUs" or some such option in it as well.

The E6750 is probably better than the Q6600 for gaming only though (two faster main cores).

[Engels]

Gaming benchmarks I found on Anandtech & Tom's pretty much tie the Q6600 to the E6750, with a few variations here and there, favoring the 6750 by a hair.

[Amaron]

According to Wikipedia:

The P35 Express chipset supports Intel's LGA775 socket and Core 2 Duo and Quad processors, and is also known to support upcoming 45nm Wolfdale/Yorkfield dual and quad core CPUs

Features
1333/1066/800 MHz System Bus

I think Wolfdale/Yorkfield is what you want.  Penryn is the sequel to the mobile cpu's from what I see.  Although I also see people saying the p35 will run the Penryn anyways so it doesn't matter much.

Wiki says the Wolfdale/Yorkfield will run at 1333mhz bus speed.    The specs sheet for the GIGABYTE GA-P35C-DS3 says it supports DDR3 at 1333 but DDR2 support only goes up to 1066.

For future scalability this means if you upgrade your CPU and still use DDR2 it will be running the memory async at 1066 or less depending on your memory.  If you get DDR3 it'll be running at full speed.  Beyond the Wolfdale/Yorkfield it's at least possible Intel will eventually release new chips on this slot type which could support higher bus speeds and thus faster memory that might not work with this board.

Frankly speaking though DDR3 1333 not being fast enough is probably a long way off.   It'd only likely happen after Wolfdale sometime and at that point you'd still likely only be one level behind on memory speed.

I haven't been paying much attention to the PCIe thing but just looking at the X38 it supports PCIe 2.0.  You should look into whether or not that's going to take off and whether you'll need it for future graphics cards.   I think if you get hit by anything it'll be graphics card limitations or Intel changing it's bus architecture.    This P35 board looks like it can provide adequate CPU power and memory speed for a long while to come.   It's hard to predict that sort of thing of course though.

What do you have currently by the way?  Asking questions at anadtech is a good idea but those people are horrible when it comes to deciding overall power balance on a budget.  Even when they aren't busy insulting you because they think the thing you want to buy is already out of date they can't really face the idea that a cheap PC might only be something like 20~30% slower than their 4k+ affair.   Thus I've found they often won't face what will make a cheap PC run quickly.

[Engels]

Thanks for the detailed summary, Amaron. I had gathered most of what you'd mentioned, but its good to have it confirmed.

I'm currently running an AMD Athlon 64 FX-60 Dual Core 2.6 GHz with 2.8 gig (actually 3 gig but only 2.8 recognised by XP) DDR PC3200 at factory recommended timings.

All this is very good for what it is, and if I weren't after teh shiny, I could get away with this rig for a while longer.