New CPU? Core i7 970/980 vs Ivy Bridge


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Well hang on Muhammad, it is 1366, and it's not a chipset, it's a pin count.

(sorry, had to)

Furthermore, only the x58 chipset is linked to the 1366 CPU socket (some CPU sockets have more than one chipset - ex: socket 1156 - had P55 and H55, etc).
  • 2 months later...

I just read that the Core i7 970 is EOL as from Jan this year and some retailers can get these ******* up until June (so next month).

Worth the upgrade given this news or can I better wait and build my own new rig when the time comes (and I find my current PC slow at that time)?

I don't think you'll see much improvement from a Core i7 970. It has two extra cores but it's the same architecture. Do you regularly find yourself using 4 or more threads on your CPU to 100%?

You won't see any improvement in gaming or most applications but you will see an improvement in music transcoding and video transcoding. Apart from that ? questionable.

If I was in your position I wouldn't upgrade the CPU and instead I'd save the money. There will be something else you will want in the next 6 months and you'll probably kick yourself for buying that unneeded Core i7 970 when that item is released and you don't have the money for it.

They released the vanilla 980 (locked) version of the 980X to replace the 970. I have a 920 with two GTX 580 3GB in SLI and I found that in modern games like BF3 my 920 is still solid and underutilized at 5760x1080. In silly games like WoW or GW2 where they are CPU bound my GPUs are at 50% load and I get stupidly low FPS and my CPU is at 100%. History Channel Guy: "Optimizations"

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