The I5 is a good deal at $200.00. What it's going to do is really put a hurting on AMD. It's as good as or better than anything they make, in most measurable benchmarks, and cheaper. As of right now AMD is going to find it really hard to sell any chip they make, in any quantity, for more than $200 because of it. Hopefully this won't be too bad on AMD. We're getting all these neat new processors because of competition between AMD and Intel. Make no mistake, if there was no AMD we'd all still be running 32 bit Pentium III processors. Intel has opened up a real big can of whoop-ass the last year only because AMD pushed them.
The other peripherals, motherboards, RAM, are also cheaper for the I5 than the 920i7. Still though, I'd opt for the 920 if it's not over your budget. A couple of shortcomings of the I5 (Or more precisely the LGA-1156 socket processors. There are some processors labeled as I7 that work on the LGA-1156 socket.)
1, The PCIe controller (video card controller) has been moved from the motherboard to the processor. While in theory this is an improvement, with less latency, in execution they crippled it a bit by only offering 16 PCIe lanes. What that means is it's optimized for a single GPU. It bottlenecks when running either a video card with 2X GPU ( for example the ATI 4870X2 or Nvidea 295) or X-fire/SLI multi-card setups.
Bottom line is that your video performance is limited compared to the 920 or any other LGA-1366 socket processor.
2, No hyperthreading. In applications that can take advantage of it, hyperthreading can make big improvements. It basically turns your guad core into an 8 core processor. This should get more important as time goes on and more programs take advantage of this feature. The faster LGA-1156 processors have hyperthreading enabled. The I5 is fully capable of of hyperthreading but Intel chose to cripple it and deactivate that funtion so as not to completely kill the 920i7 processor sales.
3, The 920, and other LGA-1366 processors, use 3 channel memory. This improves performance, but not as much some might think.
4, Ease of overclocking. The LGA-1366 processors can be overclocked quite a bit before you have to apply any additional voltage. The I5/LGA-1156 requires additional voltage to get any kind of a reasonable overclock. This will shorten processor life and requires you purchase an aftermarket CPU cooler. Although LGA-1156 processors should be very voltage tolerant. Personally though, if I'm going to run an overclock 24/7, I'd rather not apply additional voltage. Others do it without concern though. Your mileage may vary.
On a plus side for the new processors though, they implement turboboost much better than previous processors. This is where the processor overclocks itself when running an app. that doesn't use multiple cores. In that situation the new I5 and it's LGA-1156 litter mates really shine. IMO though, as time goes on and more apps take advantage of multiple processor cores this will be less and less important.
Additionally, down the line the 6 core processors that are coming are supposed to be LGA-1366 processors. This means that if you decide to upgrade to a 6 core processor in the future you should be able to use your old motherboard and ram if you buy a LGA-1366 processor today.
So if it was me, I'd by a a LGA-1366 processor (the 920i7).
Topic: So what's the skinny on the new I5? Pesty, Nem, ToastyO, looking at you guys. (Read 1575 times)