New Gigabyte Mobo - AM3 or LGA 1336

[Nicolas16]

Hey Guys! - Hope you can answer my question.

In a thunderstorm my RAM/CPU/MOBO where burned, due electrical shock. That means I gotta buy some new stuff for my PC.

The following parts of hardware, that are working:

Corsair H50
Corsair HX 1000
HD 4870 512 MB
ATCS 840 CM

I don't want a socket that gets replaced very soon. I want a socket, so that I can buy another CPU in a year og maybe two, without buying a new motherboard. Can anyone help me out here?

[Nickel020]

Re: New Gigabyte Mobo - AM3 or LGA 1336

Both of these sockets will be around for a while. Avoid S775 and AM2/AM2+ if you want to be sure.

While future CPUs may use the same socket a current board must not necessarily support them because sometimes changes to the board layout are needed for them to work. So there's never a 100% that future CPUs will work, but companies like Gigabyte and Asus are usually quite fast in providing BIOS updates to add support for newer CPUs. So it has to really be a board design issue if a CPU is not supported. This is rare, but is has happened.

[Psycho101]

Re: New Gigabyte Mobo - AM3 or LGA 1336

It depends what you want from your PC.

AM3 and AMD chips are fine by me. I like them. Phenom II is a very good product and pricing is reasonable. However, as is the way of things atm, AMD's latest socket CPU's can still be out performed in most areas by a 775 Intel offering. Hopefully Phenom III will address this and maybe even compete well with i5/i7. I hope so, as I don't like a stagnant market with one superior product. I buy Intel but I'd like to see AMD give em a kick in the balls by at least the 2nd quarter of next year. With the pricing of i5 and it's 2 cores 4 threads, most AMD chips may start to seem a little expensive for what you get.

As you know, 1366 is expensive atm, even with the "lower end" X58's around, it can cost a bit for a solid overclocker (mobo), the actual CPU and 6GB of 1333 or higher DDR3. As Intel have already announced a different socket and chipset for i5, who knows what they're planning to do with 1366. Hopefully they keep it as the high end CPU socket, like it is now.

For games, AMD vs Intel (775 or 1366) isn't that far apart. In some games, at the same clock speeds, AMD pull away ever so slightly. I'm not sure how common 4GHz+ clocks are on AMD chips though. I've seen some run at 4GHz, but the highest general clocks (guess by me) seem to be around 3.4-3.8GHz on air cooling. Core i7 with HT on can confusingly perform worse than all of them in games, if certain benchmark tests on some sites are to be believed.

As far as video encodng/transcoding, audio, Virtual machines and anything very multi-threaded goes, you'll maybe see 20-25% performance advantage clock-for-clock with an i7. If this matters then it's unbeatable for that purpose currently.

Go with what you can afford for the purpose you intend, and expect both sockets to remain current for at least the next year or two.

Either way, consider posting with how you get on. Just a quick line if you like. What speed you got up to, ease of setup etc. There are very few AMD posts here, so if you go for AM3, definitely let us know how it works for you.

[Judderman]

Re: New Gigabyte Mobo - AM3 or LGA 1336

Hi :)

Just thought I would throw in my 2 pennys worth lol.

I recently built my new system but was restricted on price so opted for the AM3 path. I am not a huge gamer but do like to play a FPS now and again and I run a couple of virtual machines for testing stuff.

I have found the AM3 platform excellent and 100% stable even when overclocked to 3.8ghz but would agree that performance wise the i7 is still king of the hill.

The bottom line is decide how much you want to pay out as an AM3 mobo, cpu and memory will save you a lot of bucks over the i7 platform. If gaming is your brand of vodka then use the money you save to buy an extra graphics gard and put it in xfire/SLI.

Good luck which ever route you decide :)

[Lsdmeasap]

Re: New Gigabyte Mobo - AM3 or LGA 1336

1366 Vote from me, Gigabyte X58 boards will have a refresh when P55 is released if you can wait that long. If not any X58 out today will last you a few years/CPU's anyway