Is it worth it to pay the extra $100 for the 2600K over the 2500K? For SETI and for general game use?

I'm looking at building a new machine since my old one has been having trouble lately and debating between these. Might hold off and wait for the LGA 2011s though too.

Is it worth it to pay the extra $100 for the 2600K over the 2500K? For SETI and for general game use?

I'm looking at building a new machine since my old one has been having trouble lately and debating between these. Might hold off and wait for the LGA 2011s though too.

Well for your $100 you get HT, so 8 threads instead of 4, an extra 100MHz, & a slightly faster embedded GPU, that you may or may not use. Personally I'm waiting for Ivy Bridge to come out before I replace my C2D E8400.

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SETI@home classic workunits: 93,865 CPU time: 863,447 hours
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Is it worth it to pay the extra $100 for the 2600K over the 2500K? For SETI and for general game use?

I'm looking at building a new machine since my old one has been having trouble lately and debating between these. Might hold off and wait for the LGA 2011s though too.

Well for your $100 you get HT, so 8 threads instead of 4, an extra 100MHz, & a slightly faster embedded GPU, that you may or may not use. Personally I'm waiting for Ivy Bridge to come out before I replace my C2D E8400.

Same here, I would pay for the difference, if for anything even more flexibility in the future. Those 8 threads will come in handy with some games and in the future as more things take advantage of the tech. The turbo is the main advantage, the higher clock on it will make a pretty sizable difference between the two in my opinion. At the very least if I was building a SandyBridge system I would go with the 2600K, it's the only one that really make sense to me.

I'm in the same boat about replacing my 775 platforms, e8400 in the server and the q9650 in my gaming/boinc rig. Once Ivy Bridge and Bulldozer both get here I'll start thinking about my upgrade path. As of right now there are faster rigs crunching away, however in everything else I do my C2D and C2Q are holding their own in every situation.

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Traveling through space at ~67,000mph!

It will depend on the application, but for ones that like cache, probably the increase from 6M to 8M going from 2500K to 2600K will help also.

Whether it is worth the extra price is pretty personal. I suspect that a hypothetical person building a large SETI fleet of otherwise skimpy boxes would find their compute per dollar quite a lot better on the 2500K at these prices. On the other hand plenty of people have paid over $100 for smaller performance improvements than this in the past.

A tricky point is that the benefit of both HT and cache is tricky to measure, and the answer can change in a few months with a different set of applications.

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Yah, assuming my C2Q keeps working I'd like to hold off until the 6 core 2011s come out, but having just replaced a blown power supply (with a 1200 Watt Corsair) I find myself thinking it's upgrade time to something that can take more than 2 GPUs.

I do wonder what the launch price on an X68??? MB and Processor will be though.

....
I do wonder what the launch price on an X68??? MB and Processor will be though.

You will be paying about the same price as when the X58 1st launched, but you will be up for 4 sticks of memory instead of 3 to supply all the memory channels. ;)

Cheers.

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Sincs a few years, I've never really blown a PSU, (almost) all new PSUs have a surge protection, very fast (electronic) and a thermal (very slow) proction.

Last time, I thought the PSU was killed, it simply worked, after about 5 minutes.
By the way, a bad connection can cause, spark(l)ing noise, burned connector!
(In fact they have 3, overload, shortcut/ surge(above max Amps. and voltage control,
plus current (Amp.) control.)

And most, or too much are getting (too) hot, cause, they're in top of the case.
And have a high efficiency, often >85%, and produce very little heat, even when used
at 85% of their Power rating, 1000W PSU, delivers 850W, whitout much of a sweat!
(Tried this with 17, 50Watt 12V car lights, quite a lot of light, you might say)
And I know a CPU/RAM/Mobo is a capacitive load. Not resistive (Ohm).

I7 versus i5, is the thread title, sorry for the diversion, it's a (bad) habit ;), I'd
choose an i7-2600, which I already did. Only my (OCed)X9650, gives the same
Whetstone MIPS as my (stock) i7, 3335MFLOPS, according to BOINC and the X9650
gives 3540MFLOPS (@3.5GHz.).
But i7, does this with Hyper Threading On, depending on setting and cooling,
it down-clocks a bit 3.33GHz, if 8 cores are fully used.(SSSE3x)

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I, just noticed something I cannot explain, 2 i7s, a i7 860 and a i7-2600, both with
HT on, so 8 cores, are reported as 4 x 3345MHz.?

i7 860, i7-2600.
Probably a simple explanation, but I don't see it.
Maybe 'cosmetic', it is still a Bêta-test version and it doesn't do any harm, just
some confusion :)

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Fred,
Look again. The 860 was reported at 2.8 GHz while the 2600 was at 3.4 GHz.
Dan

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