Intel raises Core 2 bus speeds, lowers prices

[racerblur]

Model Clock speed Cores Bus speed L2 cache (total) Price
Core 2 Duo E6550 2.33GHz 2 1333MHz 4MB $163
Core 2 Duo E6750 2.66GHz 2 1333MHz 4MB $183
Core 2 Duo E6850 3.0GHz 2 1333MHz 4MB $266
Core 2 Quad Q6700 2.66GHz 4 1066MHz 8MB $530
Core 2 Extreme QX6850 3.0GHz 4 1333MHz 8MB $999

Geez, if I only waited... ;D

Oh well... the cost of being on the bleeding edge...

[nikonnut]

And rumor has it that the "lowly" Q6600 will drop to $266.00. If it's true I'll be buying my third CPU in a month. "And then the Penryns came..." I need a raise!

Cheers,
Chris

[racerblur]

Couldn't wait for the "lowly" q6600 to drop price. I bought mine when it first went down to $488. It's a nice chip -- I'm clocking a solid 3.0Ghz! I think I could go higher, but I like to wait and see how things go.... It's plenty fast now and well I need to upgrade my ram first. I have 667 running at 800... Umm, I'd like to get 800s and run them higher. We'll see. If anyone is the market for a 2.13... I've got a slightly used one that's never been overclocked! It was only in machine for a week before I bought the q6600... Maybe I'll just build another hackie! =) ;D

[nikonnut]

Well all, as of today newegg has the Q6600 for $299.99. Not sure if it will drop that last $33.00 but still a great deal. Time for more O.T. Sigh

Hey Racer, how about posting some benchmarks. Geekbench is a good one for Mac (It seems to have one flaw but not too big a deal) and if you are running windows the possibilities are endless. I like most everything from Futuremark and SuperPi and Prime95 as good for the CPU too. Let me know how your Hack handles ;D

Cheers,
Chris

[racerblur]

Hey Nikonnut,

Haven't had a chance to do any benchmarks yet... but as soon as I do... I'll post them... hopefully they'll be good! Did you get the q66000? or are you moving up to q6850 extreme?

[nikonnut]

Racer,
For the moment I have an E6700 which propels my rig past a Mac Pro nicely. Kind of broke at the moment but a new job looks promising if I can afford the move Then a whole new Hack will arise that will be Penryn ready but a QX6850 does sound good! ;D

Here are some rough scores (give or take a few points with stock clocks);
Xbench (I know, boo! but everybody still uses it )-170 ish
Geekbench-3525 +/-
Futuremark PCmark05 - 7500 ish
Futuremark 3Dmark06 - 6000 ish

I'll have OC a bit and try again.

Can wait to see some results...

Cheers,
Chris

[racerblur]

Geekbench Score 4659 -- I dunno if that's good or bad... hmmm
Version Geekbench 2.0.5
Platform Mac OS X x86 (32-bit)
Operating System Mac OS X 10.4.9 (Build 8P2137)
Processor Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad CPU @ 2.40GHz (O'C 3.0)
Model Hackintosh
Memory 2.00 GB 667 MHz RAM

[racerblur]

This the best I can squeeze out of my setup is 3.03mhz Q6600 isn't overclocking friendly since I can't play with the multiplier... I scored slight higher... still not better the mac pro... but not that bad considering...
Geekbench Score 4742
Version Geekbench 2.0.5
Platform Mac OS X x86 (32-bit)
Operating System Mac OS X 10.4.9 (Build 8P2137)
Processor Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad CPU @ 2.40GHz
Model Hackintosh
Memory 2.00 GB 667 MHz RAM

[nikonnut]

Racer,
Nice! I'm thinking a faster machine is definitely in the future ;D. I'm guessing anything near 5000 is AWESOME. I'd love to see how fast your machine can render the Retouch Artists speedtest. Need me to send you a copy of CS3? I believe that your machine would get very close to the fastest Mac Pro. Great results.

Cheers,
Chris

P.S. O.K, I see how bad Xbench sucks now.

[nikonnut]

Racer,
Your adventures in OCing got me in the mood to tweek my own system.

E6700 2.66 oc'd to 3.13 GHz
FBS 1.25 GHz
3.12 GB of DDR2 PC-5300 @626 MHz (1:1) 4-4-4-12 w/ voltage at 1.904

GeekBench 4218.

Now I'm at the limit. Upping the FSB to 333 MHz causes a failure before I get anywhere near the boot screen and at 320 MHz any kind of CPU stress (mainly PC mark 05) causes an instantaneous reboot during the video/audio encoding tests. So these are the settings I'll stick with for now. Oh, and since I lost my job Monday I'll stick with this system for a while, too. ;D Better things are coming and then I'll build a hack for the ages!

Cheers,
Chris

[racerblur]

Hey Nikon,

I've been on vacation/business (I'm not sure what) for a week (siggraph 2007) and I'm back! Sorry to hear that you lost your job! Unless of course you didn't like it that much.... looking for a change?!

4218 ain't bad... wondering how well my 2.13 would overclock? Not worth the effort finding out, but it was just a thought. I'd like to hit 5000 at least... d**n could you imagine 10,000? That would be something... but not with this rig... 8 core anyone? I'm sure that would need water cooling!

Hmm wonder what score a 8 core Mac Pro gets? Anyone know?

[nikonnut]

Racer,
Definitely time for a change so I'm not too worried yet! As for a MacPro- the highest score at GeekBench right now is a 8-core 3.0GHz model with 5.0 GB of RAM. It scores 9044. I'm thinking that the Penryns will push the next gen Mac Pros well into the 10000+ range. As for a hack, I'm guessing that a Hackie can do it too but it'll be a pricey rig. Only time will tell ;D Keep us informed as you turn up the Hack. I'm guessing you or aqua will be the first to bust the 10000 mark. As for me , I need a new MoBo before I start getting to crazy.

Cheers,
Chris

[racerblur]

I waiting to see if anyone would try to make a hackie out of a server mobo.... I was tempted at work... actually I booted a intel dual xeon machine with hacked 10.4.8 and it worked, but didn't see the hd... hmm? Anyhow, I didn't have time to play more because I was at work and the network admin was asking me when I would be finished playing with the new LTO3 backup server.... hmmm dammit... yeah, I guess I should be working when I'm at work... anyhow, yeah, it was dual 3.6 xeon Processor MP you know the classic 90... I wonder if anyone has ever tried getting the newer xeon mobos to work... expensive, but at least the ram isn't as expensive as a mac pro!

[nikonnut]

Racer,
A server would make an AWESOME hack! I guess in all reality a Mac Pro is a personal rig running server hardware, right? The last server I messed with was an old HP rig at my Dad's ISP. It ran a pair of Pentium Pros (200 MHz I think) 4 GB of RAM, and (5) 9 GB hot swapppable HDDs. Cutting edge back in 1995 .
On an aside, been fiddling with my Hack and OCing and discovered a little flaw. Ran the Orthos Beta (which is a modification of Prime95) by Jonny Lee and my rig isn't nearly as stable as I thought! Running Orthos in tandem with Intel's Temperature Analysis Tool gives some interesting results, I'm completely stable at 3.0GHz (Orthos for 12 hours) but bump it up to 3.13 GHz (which I thought was safe) and the system shuts down after 2 minutes. Weird thing is that the shut down appears to to be totally independent of the core temps as their is less than a 3^oC difference between the clock settings and nowhere near the throttle down temps. Not sure if water cooling would alleviate this problem or not. I guess that's a good reason to get a CM832 and a nice Swiftec set-up. ;D

[aquamac]

The idea of making a hackie out of a server motherboard I have to say is really appealing. I have spent many happy hours doing sad things, like going through Tyan's website looking for suitable donors, but as you say, they are expensive and that's before you start factoring the Xeon's and say a modest 32 gig's of memory! Love to see it done though. I remember seeing a while back that the Mac Pro has a twin sister Dual Xeon board from PC land with a normal PC bios, but only 1 PCIe x 16 slot the others were PCI or PCI-X, I believe. But I hunted the other day and couldn't find it. It was the same size form factor as a mac Pro too. Think the number had a 5 at the beginning.

If I were a rich man, da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da................

Seriously though, it would be an awesome project! ;D