EggXpert

Hi,

I am a new member here but a long time newegg customer.  I am about to, or thinking about upgrading my system, which in this case means building a new system.  I have been messing with computers since about 1983 or so I have a pretty good idea about what is going on but as you all know this stuff changes every day, minute, second...  I learned for me to get in and out. wHAT i MEAN IS GET IN WHEN i AM READY TO BUY AND STAY OUT (AWAY FROM SITES LIKE NEWEGG WHEN I AM HAPPY WITH MY CURRENT SYSTEM)  (sorry about the caps) if I look I ewould end up spending all my money..

what I have now is a asus motherboard (stuck with asus for a long time) but I am not thrilled about my current MB it is a P5N32-SLI DELUXE, it just hasnt ever quite worked correctly.  However I will give them this one. I have 2 gig of ram, 4 250gig hard drives set up in raid0, and nvidia 7900 sli cards. and everything is water cooled. I guess thats good for my specs it is asking for, the rest is standard stuff, I do have a 21" flat pannel HP monitor...

My question is about FSB, I am confused about this   FSB: QPI 6.4GT/S  what does this mean?   and should I go for this or the 1600/1333.  I think either way I am going to need new memory, and graphics card, so I will probably be back with more questions.

thanks for any help.

John

Hey how's it going, seems everyone is asking this question in different terms and posts so I decided to do some research and find out so I went to Intels website and here is what I found. QPI = Quick Path Interconnections which boils down to they added memory controllers to the chips and doubled the threads and the speed at which they communicate between the cores, memory, the computer and you. Now mind you this is just my opinion here its just another way to stop us the consumer from OCing the system beyond what they want us too. It does have a turbo mode of 3.4 whatever. Here is the link to their story and please watch the demo video it explains it far better than I can.

http://www.intel.com/technology/quickpath/index.htm?iid=tech_arch_nextgen+body_quickpath_bullet

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What goes around comes around!
GA-Z68XP-UD3, i5 2500K@4.86ghz, 8gigs Corsair 1600 Ram, 7770 HIS VC, PCP&C 650 PSU, Crucial M4 128gig SSD, W7 HP 64bit OS, 2 Lite-On ODDs, Quad Hot Swap 2.5" Dock, DIY case and 25.5" Asus WS monitor

I am still catching up with this new nahalem business, while I know the turbo mode just increase 1 multiplier if one of the core is max out and goes to next one and max turbo mode is 2 multiplier I think.

core i7 965 stock at 3.2ghz with 24 X 133mhz, with 1x turbo is 3.33ghz 25 X 133mhz and with 2x turbo is 3.46ghz 26 X 133mhz.  Correct me if I am not understanding it correctly.

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Thanks guys,  I will check out the link.  I am really wondering about the speed.  I guess this is something really new, I havent searched for anything else about this yet I just ame here first.

 I dont think I will ever get over this, I feel like a newbie everytime I go to build a new PC.. just so much new..

thanks again

"the more you learn the more you realize how little you do know" that goes for everything, not just the computer world.

I know exactly what you mean though, it is insane how fast things change, seems like nvidia was making a new vgraphics card just about every month.  I got my first PC given to me back in the early 80's it was a commadore superPET with a wopping 32k of ram, Ive owned a pc ever since, have a degree in computer science and electronics engineering and I mean it when I say I feel like a newbie right at this moment.  sometimes It just seems overwhelming.  I have found it takes me about 3 days of hard research to catch up where I feel good about putting a new PC together.

Oh then the worst feeling comes over me when a week later I find there is something better that makes what I just built on the verge of being obsolete.  :)

I think I have calmed myself down on building right now,  I had loaded a old game I always liked (Battlezone II) and found the fps were very low when things got going. at first I thought it was just the pc couldnt handle it, and I have not been thrilled about the MB I picked last time.  Well I found that it was just the graphic cards drivers.  From what I read nvidia had stopped supporting DX6 in there newer drivers and that is what was causing the problems. I went into nvidias ftp site and got some older drivers and the game runs as smooth as can be even with all the settings as high as they go.

However the seed is sown, now Ive seen the new MB's, new graphics cards, sound cards, ddr3 memory??? (not too sure about that one either yet) and not to mention the maybe new FSB speeds and intel's new chip  (I am really wanting a quad core   so It may be too late, oh then I always have the exscuse, "I need a new case where I dont have hard drives double sided taped to the case door, and if I get a new case I might as well get a new   this that and the other...   :) 

thanks again guys

Ok, guys,

Here's the magic answer:

Transfer or the more common derivatives Gigatransfer (GT) and Megatransfer (MT) are terms used in computer technology, referring to a number of data transfers (or operations). They are most commonly used for measuring transfer rates (usually as transfers per second, GT/s, MT/s, etc.). 1 GT/s means 10⁹ or one (US/short scale) billion transfers per second, while 1 MT/s is 10⁶ or one million transfers per second. In order to calculate the data transmission rate, one has to multiply the transfer rate by the information channel width. For example if we have a data bus of 8 bytes with transfer rate of 1 GT/s then the data rate would be 8 GB/s.

The units usually refer to the "effective" number of transfers, or transfers perceived from "outside" of a system or component, as opposed to the internal speed or rate of the clock of the system. One example is a computer bus running at double data rate where data is transferred on both the rising and falling edge of the clock signal. If its internal clock runs at 100 MHz, then the effective rate is 200 MT/s, because there are 100 million rising edges per second and 100 million falling edges per second of a clock signal running at 100 MHz.

In the megatransfer range falls SCSI (Small Computer Systems Interface), while newer bus architectures like the Front side bus, Quick Path Interconnect, PCI Express and HyperTransport operate at the rate of a few GT/s.

 Taken from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigatransfer

 By the sounds of the specs of this new i7...it blows the doors off anything out there right now! 

Hi jgreb,

I am new to this forum but I have to say it is really good to find I am not the only child of the 80's to have a hard time keeping up witht the technology.

Your background sounds very much like my own, my first PC was a commodore 64 but I learned to program on a PET with 8k of ram, love those tape drives.  I also have a degree in computer science and sometimes it feels like I need to go back and get another just to keep up.

 I found this thread while researching my own newest build, an i7 on an Asus p6t deluxe MB.  I just bought the triple channel corsair package at 1333 but now I am wondering if I should have spent the additional 10 bucks to go with the 1600.  Oh well, maybe next year.

Thanks for all the information guys, I learned a lot. 

I'm replying two years after the original post in this thread, but I know the feeling of frustration so well that I feel I must reply.  My experience goes way back - I built my own ham radio as a child in the 1950s, I went to computer science graduate school in the 1970s, I've been using PCs since they came out (and Unix even longer), and I've been building or repairing my PCs since the 1980s, but every time I'm faced with building a new one, it's like I have to start all over again. 

I'm not complaining.  I love how computer performance has improved.  I'd never go back.  And I believe that constantly being forced to learn anew is good for us.  Nonetheless, it's frustrating that every time I go to build a computer, I fall into the same trap of thinking I know what I need to know, only to find how thoroughly the world has changed in just the couple of years since my last build.

 Like John, I'm now trying to understand QPI and how it affects my decision making.  I haven't yet done any overclocking, but I don't want to rule it out. I'm also trying to decide what I should do about RAM: will "performance" RAM be a waste of money and will getting DDR3-1600 give me any benefit over DDR3-1333 or DDR3-1067?  I feel like such a n00b!

I need a system with maximum OpenGL and video editing performance; I make videos (machinimas) in Second Life at max resolution and max graphics settings, and I use Adobe Premiere Pro for video editing, so I need a fairly strong system.

 The components I'm considering now are:

•  Intel i7-950
• ASUS Sabertooth X58 or  ASUS P6X58D-E
• 12gb of RAM (currently considering 6*2gb Crucial Ballistix DDR3-1600 or 3*4gb Kingston DDR3-1333)

 Any advice will be appreciated!

Is tough to keep up with technology now due to the rapid changing, but the forum is a great place to gather information.

I am not sure what your budget is: your parts are very good for video editing.  To further improve the performance you might want to invest in an aftermarket heatsink for overclocking.  Sandy Bridge and AMD Bulldozer should be coming out in a few months, so if you can wait you might want to see how those new chip perform before you drop your money on the i7 which is already 2 years old platform.  

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Thanks for replying so quickly.  Unfortunately, I need the computer now, and in any case, I've found that there's always a compelling reason to wait a little longer, so I just buy the best I can afford when I need it and don't worry about what might be available tomorrow.  I currently have two desktop computers that I built a few years ago (both are Core 2 Duo 3.0ghz with 8gb RAM and Win 7 64-bit).  The computer I'm building now will be my third, and I'll use it along with the other two.  When it's time to upgrade those other two, probably in 1 - 2 years, I'll get the newer technology.

I am considering aftermarket cooling for my CPU but haven't had a chance yet to research it.

I'm budgeting $1,000 for the build; this doesn't count the power supply, video card, OS, or DVD burner that I already have, or the 60gb OCZ Vertex 2 that I plan to buy.

I don't have much time to spend in these forums, but I've been a satisfied Newegg customer since 2003 and when I need to make a decision about technology that's beyond my knowledge set, I come here for guidance.

Basically you need the case, motherboard, cpu, ram and aftermarket heatsink?  You should post in the System Build section, since there are more experts that have better knowledge than I do obviously.

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