Core 2 Duo

While not shipping to vendors yet, intel's newest Core 2 Duo chip is making quite the waves all over the industry. Unfortunately, I haven't had hands-on experience with one yet, but what I've read backs up everything I've ever said. Everyone in the industry is claiming a revolution in processing power.

A lot of people asked me if this chip was worth waiting for, and honestly, I think it might just be in certain groups. Fact is, under normal circumstances, the Core 2 is not all that much faster than the latest AMD offerings, maybe 5 to 10 percent. However, once the variables of over-clocking come into play, this thing is killer.

The Core 2 to get is the E6600 chip. This is the least expensive chip with the full 4MB of cache on board. At stock speeds, this chip runs at 2.4ghz, on a 266mhz system bus. The fastest of the Core 2 line currently is the X6800, running a cool 2.93ghz on the same bus. For a quick reference, CPU speed is derived by multiplying the bus frequency by a number. In the case of the X6800, that number is 11, and the E6600's is 9. To get the $319 E6600 to the $999 X6800's speed, you'll simply need to get the bus to go faster. For 3ghz, you'll need a 333mhz bus, which is exactly what intel's 975x chipset was designed to push.

Reports on the web show that bus speeds on some motherboards are in the 450mhz range, giving an impressive 4ghz with this little chip. Interestingly enough, this little guy can run up there with a little more voltage and proper cooling. At 4ghz, there's nothing even close to this chip.

So I have neglected to post up anything about Thor, Loki or Odin yet. I have case selections all but finalized, memory, hard drive, optical, all that is done, however the motherboards are what are missing. For something like Odin, you are going to get the best of the best. That means dual x16 PCI-Express graphics slots for Crossfire or SLI. While you can get a board with nVidia's old nForce 4 SLI Intel chipset, it just doesn't clock up. Asus's P5W-DH Deluxe is the current board of all boards, but that only gives you dual x8 Crossfire, or a single 7950GX2 card. While that wouldn't be a bad solution, it's still not a perfect one. It's more like a Thor kinda thing.

Both nVidia and ATI have some good looking products on the horizon, and I suggest to anyone that is unsure about when to purchase, wait until then. If you need something now, get an AM2 machine. You'll be very happy with the performance, and have a pretty solid upgrade path to a quad-core K8L. If you can't stand to buy something today, only to have it outclassed in a month, you'll just have to be patient. Once some good 3rd party chipsets show up, I'll be sure to let you know.