[coastie65]

waldojim, on 10 April 2012 - 08:13 PM, said:

coastie65, on 10 April 2012 - 05:12 PM, said:

Not to mention that once you change the CPU, with the memory controller in the new one, you can run 1600Mhz ram. Geez. Yeah, the IGP is supposed to be a major step up from the Sandy Bridge. May get another SSD for my laptop. The one I got is 256 Gb and they do have a 512 Gb model ( I have a 500 Gb Hdd in the thing now ). Those things are over $700 though for that much capacity.

I don't just want 1600mhz, I want all 4 slots opened up! I have to run a quad core for that. I would certainly like a 500 GB drive, but the plan at the moment, is to slap in an Msata drive and keep the hard drive as well. They finally bumped up the Msata units up to 128GB, I figure that would be a great start.

The laptop I got in Dec. Only has two slots, but I can run two 8 Gb sticks for 16 Gb of ram ( I have 8 Gb in there now and it's plenty ). Msata should be fine and a good start for sure. Found my new MOBO : http://www.newegg.co...N82E16813131819 It ought to do just fine with the Ivy Bridge and GTX 680.

[LiveBrianD]

waldojim, on 11 April 2012 - 12:39 AM, said:

LiveBrianD, on 10 April 2012 - 08:36 PM, said:

Can you mount a 2.5" drive in the optical drive bay? (how often do you use the ODD anyway?)

I use mine daily - that comes with playing games.
Yes, there is an adapter to use standard drives in your ultrabay. No, I don't like that solution.

Why don't you just use those no-CD cracks? Personally, I feel that if I paid for it I should be able to do what I want with it (short of giving copies of it to others).

[LiveBrianD]

coastie65, on 11 April 2012 - 05:01 AM, said:

The laptop I got in Dec. Only has two slots, but I can run two 8 Gb sticks for 16 Gb of ram ( I have 8 Gb in there now and it's plenty ). Msata should be fine and a good start for sure. Found my new MOBO : http://www.newegg.co...N82E16813131819 It ought to do just fine with the Ivy Bridge and GTX 680.

Can't you run a Ivy Bridge processor in your existing mobo? Or is this just an excuse to get more stuff?

[coastie65]

LiveBrianD, on 11 April 2012 - 02:53 PM, said:

coastie65, on 11 April 2012 - 05:01 AM, said:

The laptop I got in Dec. Only has two slots, but I can run two 8 Gb sticks for 16 Gb of ram ( I have 8 Gb in there now and it's plenty ). Msata should be fine and a good start for sure. Found my new MOBO : http://www.newegg.co...N82E16813131819 It ought to do just fine with the Ivy Bridge and GTX 680.

Can't you run a Ivy Bridge processor in your existing mobo? Or is this just an excuse to get more stuff?

Yep, sure can, but if I want to get the most out of the GTX 680, then I should have a MOBO that supports PCIe 3.0.

[LiveBrianD]

coastie65, on 11 April 2012 - 02:59 PM, said:

Yep, sure can, but if I want to get the most out of the GTX 680, then I should have a MOBO that supports PCIe 3.0.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but... see this.

Of course, you can always pretend you didn't hear that and use the 680 as an excuse for a new mobo anyway.

[waldojim]

LiveBrianD, on 11 April 2012 - 02:49 PM, said:

waldojim, on 11 April 2012 - 12:39 AM, said:

LiveBrianD, on 10 April 2012 - 08:36 PM, said:

Can you mount a 2.5" drive in the optical drive bay? (how often do you use the ODD anyway?)

I use mine daily - that comes with playing games.
Yes, there is an adapter to use standard drives in your ultrabay. No, I don't like that solution.

Why don't you just use those no-CD cracks? Personally, I feel that if I paid for it I should be able to do what I want with it (short of giving copies of it to others).

For the obvious reasons. First, you can no longer play online. Second, you can no longer update your game. Third, this is the easiest way to get infected.

[coastie65]

LiveBrianD, on 11 April 2012 - 05:09 PM, said:

coastie65, on 11 April 2012 - 02:59 PM, said:

Yep, sure can, but if I want to get the most out of the GTX 680, then I should have a MOBO that supports PCIe 3.0.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but... see this.

Of course, you can always pretend you didn't hear that and use the 680 as an excuse for a new mobo anyway.

No burst bubble. This was a bit erroneous: "The Asus P67 and P68 motherboards which advertise PCI-E 3.0 bus speeds are not true 3.0 spec, they are simply links that have their speeds increased to 8GT/s bus speeds. True PCI-E 3.0 on Intel will first be introduced in Ivy Bridge platform". First, there was a typo here in that as far as I know, there were NO P68 chipsets, they were Z68. Second, I have seen NO P67 Chipsets advertised as 3.0 ( but there may be a Gen 3 vesion of those ). Third, I was initially looking at the Z68 Gen 3 version of the MOBO I have in here now but am now looking at the Z77 Version. It is known that if you plug a 2.0 Card into a 1.0 slot, it is backwards compatible with a performance hit of about 3%. Not much in the scheme of things I guess. As for 2.0 - 3.0, that is bandwidth and at least in part, a physical ( hardware thing; chipset ). I believe the Gen Z68 MOBOs have gone through a change in the chipset to enable 3.0. The X79 & Z77 Chipsets are entirely new chipsets and designed for 3.0. As to whether or not Nvidia has "choked" the bandwidth to 2.0 in the drivers, I can't speak to that as they may or may not have ( doesn't make sense to do so though ). Why would they release a card advertised as 3.0 and then deliberately choke it back to 2.0? It doesn't make sense in these days of looking for increasing performance. I read through that thread and take it with a grain of salt. One other thing, It may be true that you will not get "TRUE" 3.0 with Sandy Bridge and will with with Ivy Bridge. Looks like a MOBO, Video Card and Processor Upgrade on the horizon. Ugh, I think I may looking at a $1200 Upgrade here ( About $920 for the MOBO and Video Card alone + Ivy Bridge whatever the cost of that may be ). Oh well, you gotta do what you gotta do to keep up. LOL As I've said though. I am only looking at things at the moment. The performance kick would have to justify the expense for me to go that route. I am already getting some good numbers with what I have.

This post has been edited by coastie65: 12 April 2012 - 10:36 AM

[waldojim]

Actually Brian, how much did you read on that? The PCI-E controllers for the video card are all contained in the CPU. Once upgraded to PCI-E 3.0, as long as the motherboard has the switches, and signaling capable of 3.0 speeds, it is good to go. Somewhere down the thread they mention all this. Motherboard vendors, Intel, AMD, and Nvidia didn't have enough testing materials between them to certify motherboards as being 3.0 compliant. However, most of them are.

[coastie65]

waldojim, on 12 April 2012 - 09:10 AM, said:

Actually Brian, how much did you read on that? The PCI-E controllers for the video card are all contained in the CPU. Once upgraded to PCI-E 3.0, as long as the motherboard has the switches, and signaling capable of 3.0 speeds, it is good to go. Somewhere down the thread they mention all this. Motherboard vendors, Intel, AMD, and Nvidia didn't have enough testing materials between them to certify motherboards as being 3.0 compliant. However, most of them are.

Yeah, I forgot to mention the controller factor. I believe the controllers on the 2011 Socketed processor will do 3.0 ( 8GT/s ) as will the Ivy Bridge. The Sandy Bridge is at 4.5 GT/s and I don't know if it can be raised or not or if even if it would be worth the effort. I don't think Brian really read that thread through, or didn't understand what was being said. As t what was said that you wouldn't see the difference between 2.0 and 3.0, because of the wider bandwidth, I would have to question that. I know that using a 2.0 Card in a 1.0 slot, you give up about 3% on the performance, which isn't all that bad I suppose. I believe the signaling & swiches are in the Chipset itself where as the controllers are in the CPU.

[waldojim]

coastie65, on 12 April 2012 - 10:46 AM, said:

waldojim, on 12 April 2012 - 09:10 AM, said:

Actually Brian, how much did you read on that? The PCI-E controllers for the video card are all contained in the CPU. Once upgraded to PCI-E 3.0, as long as the motherboard has the switches, and signaling capable of 3.0 speeds, it is good to go. Somewhere down the thread they mention all this. Motherboard vendors, Intel, AMD, and Nvidia didn't have enough testing materials between them to certify motherboards as being 3.0 compliant. However, most of them are.

Yeah, I forgot to mention the controller factor. I believe the controllers on the 2011 Socketed processor will do 3.0 ( 8GT/s ) as will the Ivy Bridge. The Sandy Bridge is at 4.5 GT/s and I don't know if it can be raised or not or if even if it would be worth the effort. I don't think Brian really read that thread through, or didn't understand what was being said. As t what was said that you wouldn't see the difference between 2.0 and 3.0, because of the wider bandwidth, I would have to question that. I know that using a 2.0 Card in a 1.0 slot, you give up about 3% on the performance, which isn't all that bad I suppose. I believe the signaling & swiches are in the Chipset itself where as the controllers are in the CPU.

You know, the interesting thing here, is that the differences that were seen on 1.0 to 2.0 were within the margin of error. Back when the first 2.0 cards were being tested (8800GTX?), the cards weren't powerful enough to saturate the PCI-E 1.0 spec. Shoot, at the time, they still couldn't saturate AGP 8x. Last I heard, the 4670 from AMD (SEVERAL generations after the 8800GTX) is the ONLY card that can actually saturate the AGP connection. Shoot, even today, with PCIe 2.0, it is hard to justify more than an 8x link. With 5% or less performance drops, the average person would never see it. With the slightest OC offsetting that slight difference in bandwidth.

The most notable improvement you are going to have moving to 3.0 spec, is going to be with SLI. Running 4 way SLI, all the cards will have effectively the same bandwidth as the 2.0 x16spec, even though they are all running x8 links.

[coastie65]

waldojim, on 12 April 2012 - 11:35 AM, said:

coastie65, on 12 April 2012 - 10:46 AM, said:

waldojim, on 12 April 2012 - 09:10 AM, said:

Actually Brian, how much did you read on that? The PCI-E controllers for the video card are all contained in the CPU. Once upgraded to PCI-E 3.0, as long as the motherboard has the switches, and signaling capable of 3.0 speeds, it is good to go. Somewhere down the thread they mention all this. Motherboard vendors, Intel, AMD, and Nvidia didn't have enough testing materials between them to certify motherboards as being 3.0 compliant. However, most of them are.

Yeah, I forgot to mention the controller factor. I believe the controllers on the 2011 Socketed processor will do 3.0 ( 8GT/s ) as will the Ivy Bridge. The Sandy Bridge is at 4.5 GT/s and I don't know if it can be raised or not or if even if it would be worth the effort. I don't think Brian really read that thread through, or didn't understand what was being said. As t what was said that you wouldn't see the difference between 2.0 and 3.0, because of the wider bandwidth, I would have to question that. I know that using a 2.0 Card in a 1.0 slot, you give up about 3% on the performance, which isn't all that bad I suppose. I believe the signaling & swiches are in the Chipset itself where as the controllers are in the CPU.

You know, the interesting thing here, is that the differences that were seen on 1.0 to 2.0 were within the margin of error. Back when the first 2.0 cards were being tested (8800GTX?), the cards weren't powerful enough to saturate the PCI-E 1.0 spec. Shoot, at the time, they still couldn't saturate AGP 8x. Last I heard, the 4670 from AMD (SEVERAL generations after the 8800GTX) is the ONLY card that can actually saturate the AGP connection. Shoot, even today, with PCIe 2.0, it is hard to justify more than an 8x link. With 5% or less performance drops, the average person would never see it. With the slightest OC offsetting that slight difference in bandwidth.

The most notable improvement you are going to have moving to 3.0 spec, is going to be with SLI. Running 4 way SLI, all the cards will have effectively the same bandwidth as the 2.0 x16spec, even though they are all running x8 links.

Hmmm, Good point. I hadn't really thought about it from the saturation point side of things. With What I have now, it is 16x with one card, and 8x in sli. I think the third card ( I do have 3 PCIE x16 slots ) would drop it to 4x, but not sure about that ( maybe the third card would be at 4x ). I was over at Newegg and they have sold out of all the 680 cards, even the $700 ones. I am looking that the Super OC'd version at the moment at $635. My guess is that I will probably move to the Z77 version of this MOBO anyway, in anticipation of the Ivy Bridge release. I have pretty much walked away from a 2011 build. I'll leave that to you.

This post has been edited by coastie65: 12 April 2012 - 01:07 PM

[waldojim]

coastie65, on 12 April 2012 - 01:07 PM, said:

Hmmm, Good point. I hadn't really thought about it from the saturation point side of things. With What I have now, it is 16x with one card, and 8x in sli. I think the third card ( I do have 3 PCIE x16 slots ) would drop it to 4x, but not sure about that ( maybe the third card would be at 4x ). I was over at Newegg and they have sold out of all the 680 cards, even the $700 ones. I am looking that the Super OC'd version at the moment at $635. My guess is that I will probably move to the Z77 version of this MOBO anyway, in anticipation of the Ivy Bridge release. I have pretty much walked away from a 2011 build. I'll leave that to you.

That 2011 build is going to be stuck on hold a little longer than I expected. Things aren't going nearly as well as I had hoped trying to get this damned house. Every time I turn around, something else is going wrong...
But the machine will come, some day. And I don't have any doubts about 2011. Though I might end up waiting until Ivy launches for it... that would be nice.

[LiveBrianD]

waldojim, on 12 April 2012 - 09:10 AM, said:

Actually Brian, how much did you read on that? The PCI-E controllers for the video card are all contained in the CPU. Once upgraded to PCI-E 3.0, as long as the motherboard has the switches, and signaling capable of 3.0 speeds, it is good to go. Somewhere down the thread they mention all this. Motherboard vendors, Intel, AMD, and Nvidia didn't have enough testing materials between them to certify motherboards as being 3.0 compliant. However, most of them are.

Not much, but anyway, my point is that I doubt PCIe 2.0 is a bottleneck for the 680. Even if it is, it probably isn't by much.

[coastie65]

waldojim, on 12 April 2012 - 01:24 PM, said:

coastie65, on 12 April 2012 - 01:07 PM, said:

Hmmm, Good point. I hadn't really thought about it from the saturation point side of things. With What I have now, it is 16x with one card, and 8x in sli. I think the third card ( I do have 3 PCIE x16 slots ) would drop it to 4x, but not sure about that ( maybe the third card would be at 4x ). I was over at Newegg and they have sold out of all the 680 cards, even the $700 ones. I am looking that the Super OC'd version at the moment at $635. My guess is that I will probably move to the Z77 version of this MOBO anyway, in anticipation of the Ivy Bridge release. I have pretty much walked away from a 2011 build. I'll leave that to you.

That 2011 build is going to be stuck on hold a little longer than I expected. Things aren't going nearly as well as I had hoped trying to get this damned house. Every time I turn around, something else is going wrong...
But the machine will come, some day. And I don't have any doubts about 2011. Though I might end up waiting until Ivy launches for it... that would be nice.

That's usually the way it is with houses. I need to go through here from one end to the other and do a good floor to ceiling cleaning and then paint. The bathroom is long over due for a make over, but I'll probably have someone else do that. The Ivy would be a cheaper build anyway. I had thought about a 2011 build, but seeing as how I can use the Ivy, I decided to wait and see what the Ivy looks like. At about 20,835. I am getting good numbers from 3D Mark Vantage with what I have now anyway.

[coastie65]

LiveBrianD, on 12 April 2012 - 03:22 PM, said:

waldojim, on 12 April 2012 - 09:10 AM, said:

Actually Brian, how much did you read on that? The PCI-E controllers for the video card are all contained in the CPU. Once upgraded to PCI-E 3.0, as long as the motherboard has the switches, and signaling capable of 3.0 speeds, it is good to go. Somewhere down the thread they mention all this. Motherboard vendors, Intel, AMD, and Nvidia didn't have enough testing materials between them to certify motherboards as being 3.0 compliant. However, most of them are.

Not much, but anyway, my point is that I doubt PCIe 2.0 is a bottleneck for the 680. Even if it is, it probably isn't by much.

Nobody said it would bottleneck it. I was running a 9800GT ( 2.0 ) in the eMachines ( 1.1 ) and it did fine. Newegg is sold out of the 680's and I suspect most if not all are are in 2.0 slots.

[waldojim]

Nah, if people are dumping $600+ on a video card, what is another $400 for a proper motherboard and processor?!

This post has been edited by waldojim: 12 April 2012 - 08:12 PM

[coastie65]

waldojim, on 12 April 2012 - 08:12 PM, said:

Nah, if people are dumping $600+ on a video card, what is another $400 for a proper motherboard and processor?!

The MOBO on my wish list is $237 and I don't know what the Ivy Bridge will be priced at. I have never gone for the top of the line Video Card and usually settled for something further down the line which was good enough. I was surprised to find the entire line up of 680 cards (4) sold out at Newegg.

[LiveBrianD]

You can still get a 680 on amazon, though they're a bit more than they were on newegg.

[coastie65]

LiveBrianD, on 13 April 2012 - 03:13 PM, said:

You can still get a 680 on amazon, though they're a bit more than they were on newegg.

The Ivy Bridge wil cost me $320 ( the same as what I paid for this i7 2600k ) unless I go for the i 5 version, which like the i5 2500k is little different from the i7 version. No big rush on ths though as I prefer to wait until I have at least a year on this build. The numbers are good with what I have now too.

[LiveBrianD]

Performance-wise, I'm not sure that you'll get a huge gain from an Ivy Bridge i5 over your Sandy Bridge i7.