MacandPcStore.com

Fast, Easy, and Affordable

Customer Rating:
If you haven't built your own PC in awhile, be warned: it's easier than ever and the engineers at Intel are part of the reason why.

The new mounting system is completely simply. No pins to line up into tiny holes. Alignment is fool-proof, as is the clamping.

Note that this kit comes with its own heat-sink. No need to buy another, unless you are really nervous about heat. I thought the included sink was great, and I've used it for 3 months now with no issues whatsoever.

Fast? Absolutely. Team this with an SSD and you will have the fastest computer you've ever owned.

No complaints whatsoever. I'm thrilled with it.

2010 price "KNEE" - basically a good deal for an i7

Customer Rating:
Today (8-2010) in servers you can either build your own or buy one off the shelf from a mfgr. I needed 2 servers, so I did one of each.

The buy off the shelf system was an i7 975 3.33 ghz, 24 GB RAM, 1.7G 216 cuda core nvidia graphics, windows 7 ultra. I bought it from HP with some good discounts and got the price down to 2100 delivered, which at the time the proc had a street price of 1000 bucks alone. Forget the 24G of ram - that's 12 banks of 4 GB and today 2GB ram is about all you can find on the street - bigger configs are getting taken by companies like HP depleating the store supplies.

The second system I built had a more modest 8GB ram, asus motherboard, just enough to get by on VGA card until the newest cards from nvidia come out, and most importantly used this processor along with a decent power supply built for sli x4 systems. Cost was around $700, but will have a $200 hit when the new graphics card comes out for $900 with expected exceptional performance.

The ability of the graphics card to take over some of the processor's duties with cuda and the follow on from Nvidia, Fermi was an important factor in making the second system with a reduced speed i7 processor. In the futue, the pairing of the graphics card and the processor will dictate where the money does the most good.

This processor is a very economical entry into the i7 series of chips from intel. Pairing it with a 512+ processor graphics card from Nvidia will likely make more economic sense than buying a 3.33 ghz quad core duo (8 threads) - I see that as the logical progression of high performance computing solutions down the road. My only regret is the limited (8G) main memory - by creating a ramdisc on the 24G machine it runs extremely fast with 8G of main ram and 16G of ramdisc used sortof as a cache. We'll have to wait a while for the 4G dimms to come out and offer us large memory environments in the future.

Basically - don't toss all your money into the processor in future custom builds - make an evenly distributed system where the graphics card lends a hand at a performance boost. Future software won't need massive processors but balanced systems with high performance graphics. What took a week to render in high definition (1920x1080x120Hz) on a 2.83 Ghz quad core 8 GB 1 year old system was done in 1 hour on the 3.33 Ghz quad core system with the nvidia cuda 216 processors and 1.7 GB ram graphics assistant.

Great i7 to get

Customer Rating:
Good Core i7 900 series CPU to get, since this can be overclocked up to 4+ Ghz! The stock fan kind of sucks, gets 40 C idle and more than 70 C at 100% load, tested by Prime95 and RealTemp.
With a good cooler, you can overclock it up to its full potential, and save a lot of money while achieving more power than a $400 CPU.

Works great.

Customer Rating:
Over-Clocked to 4ghz relatively easy, even with it being a C0 revision.
Temperatures are fine with a decent cooler, the cores idle @ roughly ~35c & load @ ~72c.

Over clocks like there's no tomorrow

Customer Rating:
I've been using this proc for a little over a year now. It's fantastic, I have a D0 stepper and I've OCed it to 3.8 Ghz on air, (using the 120 extreme cooler). Great processor, incredible value for a base core i7 system.