J
John Doe
Guest
Gulftown was 32nm vs the 45 of Nehalem... When Gulftown was received, many were criticizing Gulftown much like you are SB-E right now... Gulftown did not bring higher memory bandwidth or more PCI-E lanes... SB-E will, much like Nehalem did in the past.
What do you mean by that bolded part?
More complicated internal die so it could be harder to OC, which is what TH also says.
The Gulftown that was criticized was the 980x due to it's weak price/performance (hence the Extreme chip). The 970 was considerable after the first price cut and people bought it for it's lower temps, higher potential and so. In fact, if you can score one on the cheap from eBay (like me), it still is. I got a 4 core Westmere at 4.25 although it's crippled by 18x multi. Got the UD9 with binned IOH so I can do 220-240 BCLK.
That said, you can have those lanes with NF200, and memory bandwidth doesn't mean much either. For example, you can use dual channel on X58 with a %1-5 performance hit.
Sandy is the best choice for everyday users/for games. Sandy-E leaves to be... for those that want to show off or need the extra cores.