I speculated earlier that I might buy a sandy bridge CPU and motherboard and that it would represent a break from 16 years of buying AMD. I have always bought at the low end of price where AMD has always offered superior competition. But I am not blind to how well sandy bridge systems perform and I am looking for more performance from my next system. I was strongly considering buying the i5-2500K and an H67 chipset motherboard. But today I learned about yet another limitation to this configuration (above the 2500K not supporting VT-d and TXT, though I’m sure no TXT is actually a loss) and that is that you cannot overclock it. So as usual Intel has a lineup which is complicated to make a choice because of all the various options in play. I much prefer AMD’s simple setup: all features on every chip and you just pick the speed and cache. Not to mention that I’d really prefer to buy ECC RAM which you can do on a consumer AMD motherboard but not on any consumer Intel board.
So not my options for a sandy bridge system look like this:
- 2500K + P67 + Video Card – fastest, most expensive, overkill for my graphics needs
- 2500K + H67 – no overclocking but HD 3000 graphics, 3.3GHz
- 2400 or 2500 + H67 – no overclocking and down to HD 2000 graphics, but gain VT-d and TXT
- wait for AMD Bulldozer and hope it offers better performance at lower price points
Notes: