Sandy Bridge worth the pricetag/wait? Your Thoughts?

Was on the Acer homepage the other day and in huge letters 'Known Sandy Bridge Bug Click Here'

Something to do with the new TimelineX series.

So Sandy Bridge is basically the 2nd Generation Core 'i' series. What kind of a price tag are we going to be looking at on these? I remember when I bought an E8600 Dual Core processor for $350 and when the Core 'i' series came out I realised I might have been ripped off..

I hope this isn't going to happen again. I'm about to buy a new PC, and it looks like loads of retailers are dropping prices in succession. Aren't they still in 'beta' stage so we cant get proper benchmarks?

Wikipedia doesn't have much 'insight' on the SB series either except this:

Don't know if that's going to be worth my money.. for an extra almost 20% performance I can see a pretty big price tag in my mind. But hey, at least I know we're progressing in the world of computers

 

Nope. It is to do with the SATA ports. You can find 1,543,875 threads about that here...


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Mmm that's explained on the Wikipedia page as well.

 

i honestly haven't heard anyone complain about price. you're getting a very nice cpu at roughly the same price points as the last generation(don't quote me on this).

 

intel is selling the the chips at the same price as last years i core series, if the manufacturers are putting a higher price tag, dont buy from that OEM, go for another.

 

If I were to buy a PC now, I most likely would wait for SandyBridge and strive for one, not because it is thaaaat much more than the previous generation (especially if not combined with other high-end components), but because it would have a higher resell value in an year or 2 from now.

Other than that - I would not sell my Arrandale PC just to buy and have Sandy. Advertisement beliefs aside - the difference in real life situations to the average user would be of no meaning (of course comparing the same class CPUs).

17, 23 or 28 % faster... I wonder what difference this would make in real life, combined with 4GB RAM and 5400 RPM hard drive... nonsense.
But this is my personal opinion, not willing to start (another) quarrel about it - every one is free to believe, trust and spend his own money any way he wants

I'm certainly not going direction Sandy. But as I said - if you are buying a PC anyway - why not wait for it... or if the price tag is the most important - wait a bit until it hits the market and previous generations become slightly cheaper.

P.s. I wonder about your signature... is 40 Mb/s a big deal in Finland (especially combined with 0.20 Mb/s upload...)? Or is there another reason for it being in the signature

 

Sandy Bridge is 20% faster for around the same price ranges. Also the quad core i7s now have IGP, so business professionals who do not need dedicated graphics but need the quad core processors will benefit. But other than that, if you are just using for basic stuff, SB is not a huge jump.

 

It's just a stupid way for guys to show off their internet speed. I actually have a much faster upload speed than that. It's about 1 Megabit. So around 100KB/s. That's not a really accurate reading, but I do get speeds of up to about 4 Megs when downloading from Microsoft of Mozilla or CNet.

I don't know. It's nothing really, have you never seen a Speedtest signature? It's kind of interesting because I haven't seen anyone else around here with one. They're usually part-and-parcel of a gaming forum user's sig.

As for the Sandy I really don't care. I don't plan to be doing anything processor intensive, I don't need the graphics capabilities and I'd rather an older series computer for a bit cheaper.

 

I would say that the SB processors are worth it simply because they perform better and have a higher performance per watt. The prices should be the same as the previous generation.

 

Well if that's the case - wait 1-2 months if you can - Arrandale prices will drop a bit and you'll be able to buy a very reasonable machine for a lower price. SB is really not SUCH a huge jump. Some users here are really impressed by the small differences - but this is exactly what Intel wants

About the internet speed - yes, I've seen it once before in a signature... but just don't find the numbers something to be proud of

What should I say...:

 

Isn't the biggest improvement of the new SB architecture the lower tdp, so you get longer battery life? The other selling point for me are the better graphics, but since the intel drivers are junk its meaningless for people who play the newest games. I think i'll wait for IB, which will also double the graphics power, but ...argh those drivers I wouldn't count on them being usefull.

Btw: I have 6.08 mb/s DL and 0.28 mb/s UL speeds. Feel sorry for us here in Belgium ^^ We get unlimited downloads, but are restricted by the dl speeds like crazy.

 

Not meaning to get off-topic but: that's university internet and I can get those speeds as well if I walk a few km down the road, smash a window, log into a computer and do a speedtest. Finland has blisteringly fast internet.

I'm more interested in your own internet speed nice try though.

 

This is the internet connection I have at home where I'm sitting right now

it does go through the Uni though, that's right. But that's pretty much the speed half of the city gets

 

I noticed that both of your speeds are very high but your ping's look really bad. I get about two thirds of Gracy123's speed at my University but the ping there is 0.2ms. I have no idea of how much difference that makes in real-life usage but just saying

 

Since these speed test needs a counter party, i don't know how useful it is to compare(throughput or ping latency).

I have a 100Mb down/up link which has a tested speed about 70Mb/s(to a local speed test server in the same region). But this is more or less meaningless for me as 90% of the time, I visit sites across the oceans where the speed test is like 10Mb/s and 5-10x ping latency.

 

I say wait.

Sandy Bridge has the advantages of:
Better battery life (smaller processor), faster clock performance, faster multi-tasking performance, possible ability to upgrade to Ivy Bridge 2012 processors, ability to use faster 1600 MHZ RAM (if you get 2720 APU over 2630 APU), bragging rights (idc about this, but you might), INTEGRATED GPU with the CPU (thus APU), and others (I'm sure I'm missing a few things).

So after that list, I will officially say "welcome to the waiting game" the rest of us are enduring.

 

Screw the waiting game. I bought last generation's technology at a very good price and I am quite happy

 

I agree with Syberia. I'm going to cash in when the old stock falls, so-to-speak.

As for your speeds and what-not. Ping isn't important here in Finland and it's certainly not high enough to lag. Speedtest isn't good for testing ping anyway. That's what pingtest is for.

 

The jury's still out for dual core SB, but from the quad core desktop and notebook reviews, it seems that the dramatic performance improvements come from either slashing the price ($300 for an i7 2600 vs $1000 for an i7 975) or bumping up the clock speed (2.2 ghz i7 2720QM vs 1.73ghz i7 740QM).

The dual core chips do neither of these, so I wonder what Intel is delivering in terms of performance that couldn't be done by making the entire Arrandale lineup 1 or 2 multipliers faster.

Of course, one can hope that where an OEM would have chosen a dual core CPU for a high end thin and light in the Arrandale era, they'll now pick a quad core CPU instead in the SB era.

 

Listed TDPs are about the same, it's just more efficient architecture (and the integrated IGP), which I suppose lowers the TDP... indirectly. I still wouldn't count on the IGP for any serious graphical work, though... even with Ivy Bridge.

 

TDP is heat dissipated not power consumption, at least for intel, for nvidia they are about the same.

 

Oh, I know that. I wasn't discussing power draw at all, just straight TDP, although there is a point that within the same generation/microarchitecture, a higher TDP will almost always result in/from a higher power draw. Still, though, my point was that while Sandy Bridge is better at power consumption (due to previously mentioned more efficient architecture), listed TDPs have remained the same as for 1st generation i-cores.

 

I got that, it was just a minor correction, since it was kind of jumbled in wat you said.