Vox: My son recently asked me what the best processors are as he wants to build a new rig. Well, after thinking about it for a while and looking at all the Intel offerings (He’s an Intel kind of person) I couldn’t tell him for sure. Then the questions came:
- “What’s the difference between dual and triple channel memory” ?
- “What CPU’s use what and why” ?
- “Is a “K” version worth the extra” ?
There seems to be a huge proliferation of CPU’s and that’s not taking the AMD devices in to the total. Not only just to pass this info on to my son, I would like to know what and if anyone really knows why all these confusingly numbered CPU’s exist (especially the i7 series) and what socket type with it’s dual/triple channel memory config is the best ? Can anyone shed some light on this?
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Reply from resident editor “Bobnova” … Ok, here you go: Ram: The practical difference is that if you need between 4gb and 6gb for your daily stuff triple is better as you’ll have three 2gb sticks without loosing performance. If you put 3 2gb sticks in 1155/1156 you are forced into single channel ram mode, which is half the speed of dual channel. Speed wise, dual and triple are quite close in everything but memory benchmarks, it’s not an issue. CPU wise: The non-K chips either have four extra multipliers for OCing (i7s) or none (i5, i3). That means for a stock speed of 3.4ghz (say a 2600), you can only OC to 3.8ghz, no further. Now, that said a 2600 at 3.8ghz is faster then a 1366 core i7 950 at 4ghz, so that’s probably OK if you aren’t planning on benching. Here is what I would tell your son: “In the mean time, check out overclockers.com as they have by far the friendliest people, including this Bobnova guy that showed up on FK recently.” “Once you get your sandybridge setup with a 2600K, I expect you to OC the balls off it and join the overclockers.com benchmarking team to help them, and bobnova, dominate the rankings” … Or something like that 🙂
The “best” varies a lot based on what you’re doing, and your resources. For instance, right now I have the “best” intel chip, a 980x (ok 990x is 2% better, sue me), it beats Sandy Bridge in everything IF I cool it with liquid nitrogen. I cannot do that as it costs a ton here, I cool with dry ice. On dry ice, the 980x cannot get high enough to beat a sandybridge chip, so for me the “best” cpu is a 2600K.
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