Hardware Updates (Why Companies Avoid Pre-announcing New Products)
posted in Technology, Hardware |This week the various hardware review sites are full of news of next Monday’s impending price cuts from Intel. On one level this is all great news since never before has this level of computing power been available at reasonable prices. At the same time there is additional news of future Intel processor roadmaps which all leaves me with a quandry about how long to wait to build my next computers. The 45nm “Penryn” desktop CPUs are supposed to ship before the end of the year, but the question is how far before the end of the year and how much better will they be than the existing 65nm CPUs that are shipping next week. Next week it will be possible to get a 3.0ghz Quad-Core 1333mhz front-side bus CPU, and sure its expensive, but will the 45nm version be any better?
AnandTech did a very useful article asking some of the key questions about the current processor lineup. For me the key questions were “does 1066mhz vs 1333mhz bus really matter for a quad-core CPU?” and “For $266, should you buy a quad-core Core 2 Quad Q6600 or a dual-core Core 2 Duo E6850?”. The former answer was “barely”. Comparing two almost identical quad-core CPUs with the different bus speeds the faster bus had less than a 1% difference overall. The biggest difference was for some of the encoding tasks, which are good benchmarks for my media-center machine, but those were still only in the 4% range.
On the second question, the quad-core chip spanked the faster clocked dual-core chip for many of the media encoding, etc, tasks. This leads me to an interesting plan- I think I’ll build a Media Center box using the Q6600 (2.4ghz quad-core) fairly soon. For this application I think it should be fine, I doubt that my earlier plan of using the 2.66ghz 1333mhz bus version will really make that much difference- at most about 10-12%, and for half the price (of the CPU).
The other dilemma is whether to both with DDR3 memory. The P35 motherboards come in either DDR2 or DDR3 versions (some have both). I was assuming that I’d want to switch to DDR3 as soon as possible (so I could buy consistent memory between machines) but a recent review shows almost no difference between the two. Fast DDR2 is better than slow DDR3, and today the only DDR3 available is slow and still costs 2-3x as much as the DDR2. Much as I’m tempted to get the ASUS P5KC that has 4 DDR2 and 2 DDR3 slots, the rest of the board doesn’t look nearly as nice as the normal P5K Deluxe so I’ll probably stick with that.
CPU: Intel Q6600- 4x 2.4ghz 1033mhz bus. $266
Motherboard: Asus P5K Deluxe. $220
Case: Zalman HD-135 Media Case. ~$275
Power Supply: Zalman Ultra-Quiet 460W $99
Memory: 2GB (1GBx2) DDR2 800mhz PC6400 CAS4 ~$105
Video: Gigabyte GF 8600GTS Silentpipe3- $183
TV Tuner: AverMedia MTVPEMCER- $104
DVD Burner: Sony Optiarc 18X DVD+R 8X SATA- $32
Total is about $1280 without hard-drives. One of the cool things about the Zalman case is it has 6 3.5″ drive bays. I’m tempted to go with 4×750GB drives which should cost an extra $800 or so. A pretty hefty addition to the price of the overall system, but 3TB is nothing to sneeze at. The newer 1TB drives are nice but way higher in cost per GB. A more reasonable option would be to go 4×500GB, which only drops me to 2TB storage (still not bad), but costs half as much and I’ve got the extra two drive bays for later.
Finally once I put the system together I might need to buy an extra case fan. I’m aiming for as silent as possible, but with no fan on the video card and all the drives its likely that the stock cooling won’t be able to handle it. I believe you can upgrade the HD-135 case with extra fans- hopefully it supports the 120mm ones, although it isn’t clear. Ideally it should be fine as is, but we will see.
As for the new workstation PC, I think I can hold off for now. I’m at least waiting for the X38 chipset to come out and ideally I’d like at least a 3.0ghz quad-core CPU and can wait for prices to come down a bit more on those (or the 3.2/3.4ghz ones to come out at the same price).