Intel P55 Launch Activities - We want your opinion!

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• kranky - Monday, September 7, 2009 - link

  I will be looking to find out if an i5/p55 is the best choice for me vs. a i7/x85. I will be replacing everything in my current outdated PC... PSU, RAM, burner, case, hard drives. I need a reliable, stable system that will last a few years and this is more important than cost.

• T2k - Friday, August 28, 2009 - link

  That's the basic question.
  
  In my case it's a quad-core X3350 (aka Q9450) running on water, currently @3.6GHz (no AC in my home office...:D)
  Paired with my 4850 X2 2GB and 4 gigs of OC'd RAM it's a pretty darn good config for *any* current game as of today so I am still wandering if, say, if I DO NOT get a new 5800-series Radeon what extra would this P55/i7-870 give me in my apps (audio/video and mostly online FPS or RTS gaming)...?
  
  As Lenin said once: OC, OC and OC.

• chromal - Friday, August 28, 2009 - link

  I kept looking for the option, "The i7 has been out for over six months and outperforms the i5. If/when I upgrade from my Core2Duo, it would be to the i7, NOT the memory-bandwidth-nerfed i5 platform, period."
  

• Kaleid - Thursday, August 27, 2009 - link

  1. e8400 E0 @ 4230 does a good enough job
  2. When it comes to gaming consoles influence the games industry too much. The PS3 and x360 won't suddenly become more powerful and most games are made for console first and then ported over to the PC. For this same reason my heavily overclocked 4770 (900-1200) will last long too...
  3. Lack of SATA3 and USB3 support
  4. Cost. New RAM (ddr3), motherboard, CPU and cooler

• baldheadeddork - Thursday, August 27, 2009 - link

  I'm very interested in a comparison between the i5/P55 and the C2Q/P45. They're in the same price range, and the shared video and memory bus restrictions on the P45 and P55 boards means that a comparison of the i5 and C2Q will directly test the difference between the two processor designs.
  
  

• ClagMaster - Thursday, August 27, 2009 - link

  Me too. Problem is the benchmarks often change and its difficult to compare three year old hardware without some scalings and extrapolations.

• philosofool - Wednesday, August 26, 2009 - link

  I'm glad to see that you guys are looking for feedback on what your readers want. I get really frustrated when a new platform comes out and the first reviews are for a $4000 triple SLI configuration of that system. It's hardly the information the consumer needs.
  
  Anyway, it's important to remember that for the crowd who is able and willing to spend a grand or more on a platform, Core i7 has been it for many months. Those users have their systems in LGA1366 form already. People holding out for LGA 1156 did so because triple channel DDR3, X58 and Core i7 920 were just too expensive. Price is going to be a big issue, and what I want to know is which of the least expensive P55 boards works the way it's supposed to. Also, given that many of these boards will offer a BIOS update in the next few months, I want to know which boards offer good BIOS update procedures.)

• oldscotch - Wednesday, August 26, 2009 - link

  Where's the "I can't answer these questions because I have no idea how it compares to my existing system" answer?

• smilingcrow - Wednesday, August 26, 2009 - link

  I’d like to see power consumption tests done at 3 settings:
  
  1. Stock speed
  2. Maximum over-clock using stock VCore (check that the board isn’t over-volting)
  3. Maximum over-clock using a sane VCore that is suitable for 24/7 usage.
  

• justaviking - Wednesday, August 26, 2009 - link

  "In your opinion, the primary highlight of a motherboard review should focus on which of the following categories"
  
  Of course price and performance are important, but the option I was looking for was "RELIABILITY AND STABILITY."
  
  In terms of performance, I mostly look for any outliers. Is one significantly faster or slower than the others? It seems to me that motherboard performance is nearly identical in most cases, at least until you get into heavy overclocking.
  
  While I might dabble with some modest ("easy") overclocking, mostly I want to put in good components with good performance, and then just have my system run. I don't want to mess with it when I'm trying to get something done. So I'm more inclined to buy a faster-performing CPU than to overclock a cheaper one, though some of the semi-automated overclocking that's available now is certainly interesting. My general approach is to purchase a CPU that is "one generation old" to avoid paying the price premium of being on the bleeding edge. Anyway, as I said, I don't want a system that's on the edge of stability. I do video editing, and it needs to be able to run at 100% load, sometimes for hours on end.
  
  Another thing I look at right away, after ooh-ing and ahh-ing at the pretty colors, are the expansion slots. I have a number of legacy components, such as a dedicated video capture card, so I would probably want two PCI slots, since one is already spoken for. The other item that catches my eye is the number of SATA ports, since I love my disk drives and have quite a collection of them.