wait to upgrade?
 

Hi. I am building a new system (soon) and am trying to decide wheter to wait for intel's new 45nm procs to come out in jan. or to just build it now with a Q6600. What is the overclocking potential of this proc and is it worth the wait till jan? (Until then im stuck with a Pentium D 820 and a Geforce 6800)

The Q6600 runs pretty cool, so it does have some definite overclocking potential.

That being said, your current Pentium D isn't all that bad. You might want to wait and see if either of AMD or Intel's new processors yield any significant performance boosts.

Well to that question you must first ask yourself, what games are you anticipating the release of and how long after their release if at all are you willing to wait? My money is on an Intel 45nm quad CPU with shared cache and single layer construction because my guess is after AMD debuts theirs Intel will produce something quite similar. The question is, if it does happen when will it release. Intel's current "cookie cutter" two Core 2s on one chip CPUs don't really impress me. I don't think they perform better enough than a Core 2 Duo to be worth the price difference.

Now what you could do, which is common practice for me and makes a lot of sense I think, is wait until the release of the games you are wanting to play and see if they are in dyer need of patching. If so, and it's often the case, it's no big deal to wait a bit longer.

I have a few things to add.

We do know that the next Intel processors will definatley be using the 45nm processor size. They will arrive in late 2007 or (more likely) early 2008. The processors are codenamed 'Penryn' (the mobile processor) and 'Yorkfield' (the desktop processor).

AMD will have their newer processors out in time for Christmas. Code named 'Phenom.' They however are using the less efficient 65nm die.

My bet is that Phenom will reach (and perhaps slighty surpass) the speed on Intel's current Core 2 Duo's/Quad's, but Intel's new chips (Penryn and Yorkfield) will be faster than the new AMD processors.

So you're banking on a 30% smaller die being more efficient than a CPU that has shared cache and all 4 cores on one layer? Don't know about that but for sure if Intel gets away from the cores having to use the FSB to communicate they will assuredly have the faster quad if they can do it at 45nm. I think it will depend too on what MB is used. Word is Intel is also increasing the speed of the memory controllers.