Last week I took delivery of my first Intel build (for myself) in...
seven years. last one was a P3-700E on an i815E board, which I cranked
to a then pretty darned quick 933Mhz
A Core 2 Duo 'Wolfdale' E8400, a 3Ghz/6MB L2 45nm part.
an Asus P5K-E/Wifi P35 'Bearlake' mainboard and 4GB of OCZ DDR2-800
(2GBx2 kit)
I'm happy to report, that the thing loves to run at high clocks, I
strongly suspect I'm actually memory clock limited as far as raising
the FSB goes and that's doing a pretty nice job (DDR2-800 @ 466Mhz
base clock, with the rated timings)
http://chryx.shacknet.nu/cpuz-wolfdale.png
It's completely rock solid at that, Orthos/3dmark etc can loop for
hours without issue.
and it's quick... I can't even begin to stress how much so... it's
snapping at the heels of the Q6600 in Cinebench R10, and whilst that's
a ways down on clock, it does have twice the cores going on.
Right now It's still using a Radeon X1900XT, which is a tad
bottleneck'y, it's getting a Radeon 2900XT 1GB just as soon as the
thing arrives (If I were buying I'd have gone with an 8800GT, but when
one manages to blag a videocard with a gig of ram, one doesn't look a
gift horse in the mouth and all that.)
Now, to make this more than just "woo, look how fast my rig is", this
sort of headroom on the darned thing makes me think that Intel are
holding back due to lack of pressure from AMD... and tbh, I think
that's a very bad sign, long term. hopefully they can pull a rabbit
out of their hat, because they've woken up a big fat sleeping giant :/
-JB
