The Glade 4.0

So.. it seems that AMD has released its new Bulldozer processors.

I'm debating about which one to purchase, with my new toy only months away now (ohboyohboyohboy). The three options for processors I'd consider are the AMD FX-8150 Bulldozer (8 cores, arranged in pairs that share some resources), the AMD 1100t Black Edition (6 cores, supposedly unlocked for easy overclocking) and the Sandy Bridge Intel Core i7 2600k (4 cores, and the company will pre-overclock it for me; 10% for free, 20% for $30, 30% for $80)

After reading some reviews, I think I'm leaning towards either the 1100t or the 2600k; it seems the Bulldozer is strongest in.. well, applications other than gaming, and since my wife is basically going to be downloading photos and using the internet, gaming performance it what I want. The 2600k seems a bit more powerful and I can get even more by ordering it pre-overclocked but I'm leery of overclocking in terms of long-term serviceability, and I do have a friend who would be only too happy to get his hands on an 1100t to overclock.

On the other hand, I can afford a much bigger SSD if I go with the 1100t, in addition to the traditional HD, and the overall price of the machine will probably be about $75 less. I can also (at the moment) get more free goodies as a bonus with the AMD; 3 games and a 4GB thumb drive although freebies aren't my deciding factor by any means.

The 2600K is also offered with SmartResponse which allegedly uses a small SSD (30-60GB) to greatly improve the performance of the main HD; up to 60% supposedly. While this still wouldn't be as fast as a stand-alone SSD it WOULD mean the entire 2 TB main hard drive would be faster, even if it was 30% faster that would be a noticeable improvement I would think.

I do have to confess though, that because I don't understand a whole lot about pipelines and threads and floating point whatchamacalits and so forth that I tend to start thinking "more cores = better" but then I also recognize clock speed affects it and.. I need a drink. I was originally dead-set on an X58 intel 6 core processer just to have 6 cores until I started looking into Sandy bridge and the 1100t and then Bulldozer came out with 8 cores (so cool!) and..

I'm so confused.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Also keep in mind that the fewer programs you regularly use (Games, etc) the more increase in response time you'll see with the Z68 chipsets "Smart Response". It automatically caches the files you use most, so if most of what you regularly access will fit in 30-60 GB, you'll see *most* of the improvement of an SSD, with the HDD being mostly used for bulk storage.

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Darksiege: You are not a god damned vulcan homie.

I tend to have from 1-3 games I play a lot at any given time.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I was in a similar boat. I waited for the Bulldozer and was greatly underwhelmed by its benchmarks. I went for the i7-2600k. I also opted for the SRT from a 60GB SSD.

AMD doesn't have anything that comes close to the i7-2600k right now. Nothing ...

To give you an idea of exactly how big a leap forward the i7-2600k is ...

It makes the $1000 i7-980X Extreme look slow.

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I use an over-clocked i7-2600k on my gaming machine. It's worked out great.

I've been quite impressed with the SRT feature on my new rig.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

My rig is still faster

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Well, sure. But mine was more budget friendly. I'm not rolling in enough money to just throw a terabyte of SSD in, stripe them, and call it a day...

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Ahh, but I'm only using a P67 Chipset, Kaffis. So, I don't have the "advantage" of smart response technology like you do ...

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Really? That's good to hear. I've been a little skeptical, but went with it & figured to hope for the best. I'm eager for a nice performance boost from the 2600k when it comes to encoding video's for Youtube. Should have it all setup & running on Monday.

Yup. Using League of Legends as a handy benchmark, I find that I'm never worse than the 2nd (or sometimes 3rd in a 5v5) person loaded, and the only person I personally know who beats me is Khross.

It's also pretty apparent to see at work -- if I haven't played in a couple weeks, I load up about as fast as my brothers. After a round or two, though, I zip right by 'em.

I've been operating off the 20GB Intel Larsen Creek SLC model, not whatever 60GB you've got ready to throw in. I'll be on the lookout, a year down the road or so, to see if anybody has offered up a larger SLC drive specced for SRT.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

So.. Core i7 2600K with 60 GB SSD SmartResponse? I'm thinking of doing this with a pair of 2TB HDDs in RAID1 (which is part of my plan to get my wife to buy into this: "Honey, the baby pictures you take will be automatically stored on 2 hard drives!"). I'll save for a SSD later, a nice big one. It's going to be a nice big case with lots of slots.

They don't offer an SSD option bigger than 60GB for the SmartResponse, although they do have a 64GB drive available, and 80s and 96s. I don't know if there's an upper limit or not.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

You're gonna run out of space pretty fast with a tiny 60 GB SSD. Have fun uninstalling games whenever you buy a new one.

Did you completely ignore the fact that he's got 4TB in other HDD's?

It's a huge hassle to install Steam games on multiple hard drives, not sure if it can even be done. Or maybe it is easy but I never saw the option.

Dude.. the SSD is in SmartResponse with the 2TB HDD. It acts as a cache to boost overall performance. That's what I was talking about in the OP; if I get the AMD processor I can afford about 240GB worth of SSD, but it won't be SmartResponse and it won't be the same processor; I'd have to get Bulldozer or 1100T.

Try to read what you're responding to before making a snide comment. I'm not an expert on computer stuff but I do understand basically what SmartResponse does.

I don't do Steam either, so that's not an issue.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

RAID1 is mirroring, not striping. There'd be zero problem installing anything to it.

Take a look at the featureset of the z68 chipset, Lex. Smart Response Technology is a new Intel tech. It dynamically caches frequently used data on a dedicated SSD cache partition.

DE, there's an upper limit to how much SRT can handle. It's 64GB. Anything beyond that can be partitioned as a normal drive.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

I see. That explains the options, although why they don't offer the 64GB model for SmartResponse on Cyberpower I'd be curious to know. I suppose 4 more GB wouldn't make a huge difference though.

Is it really all it's cracked up to be, or is it hype?

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I think the answer is simply that 64GB is not a common HDD size.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

I noticed that. Kingston is the only one that offers that and the 96GB, lthough their 128GB seems to be offered by other brands as well.

The 96GB seems to be a good deal per GB, and 2 of them in RAID0 make for a decent combination for total space compared to price, but he OCZ agility seems to give the best GB/dollar ratio. unfortunately I won't be able to afford getting some of those as well as the rest of the machine, but I figure down the road with all those drive bays I can add larger SSDs as and when I can afford them. The main 2TB/Smartresponse drive can be my wife's drive and the system drive and the SSDs will be mine... all mine!

I also though of getting a 600GB Velociraptor as the main drive and combining it with the SSD and getting the 2TB RAID1 combo as the data drive but that REALLY jacked the price up. I could do it with the 300GB Velociraptor, though.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Diamondeye,

I got my new PC from Cyberpower as well. I went with the OCZ Technology 60 GB Agility 3. I really liked the reviews & benchmarks on that one.

That's the one I'm looking at. It's also the cheapest of the 3 options for a 60 GB SmartResponse SSD.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Via steam itself it cannot be done, thats where symbolic links come into play, its not hard at all to have steam have multiple games on multiple drives just use symbolic links to point it to where you want it...